


Seeing Eyes

by MarbleGlove



Category: Dark Angel, NCIS
Genre: Crossover, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-15
Updated: 2012-02-15
Packaged: 2017-10-31 06:19:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 20
Words: 22,817
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/340882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MarbleGlove/pseuds/MarbleGlove
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gibbs' team was just a moment too late to stop the terrorists from releasing the Pulse. After that failure, it was Tony who walked away. Now it's eleven years later...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

"Gibbs, you need to come down here. I need you down here, now, Gibbs."

Gibbs looked at his phone for a second and then hung up before making his way to the stairs. Abby had sounded ... off. She'd been excited and scared and nervous like she was when she found the break in a hot case. But he didn't have any hot cases. All of his team were reviewing cold cases. Abby had been reading up on technological advances when he'd seen her this morning. His team looked curious but none of them were brave enough to question him.

It was times like this that he missed his old team most. DiNozzo and Ziva had both been able to stand up to him, tease him even, and under their tutelage, McGee had even grown a backbone near the end. God, but he missed them. They had been through thick and thin together. It had taken the Pulse, a terrorist attack worse than 9/11 to destroy that team. But it had still happened. More than ten years later, he still mourned their loss more than any of the other losses due to the Pulse.

He shook off his morbid thoughts. "What have you got for me, Abs?"

She was already pacing when he came through the door, and talking with much hand waving before the door had had a chance to close.

"I was reading up on hacking tech and I had an idea to track down Eyes Only."

"Eyes Only." There was an image of Eyes Only on her main screen and he took a moment to study it. Since he listened to the TV while working on his boat, he rarely saw the image, just heard the news when it came on. Still, he must have seen it often enough because the eyes looked familiar as he studied them.

His team had never been assigned to track down the hacker. Given the news stories that got broken through the infamous "Streaming Freedom Cable Hacks," it was pretty obvious that the guy was based on the west coast. Gibbs wasn't sure how he felt about the guy. He disapproved of vigilantism in general, but the corruption in government was so pervasive now that sometimes he felt his own team and NCIS in general were practically vigilantes themselves, trying to get around the bureaucratic rules that hobbled them.

Also, given some of the rumors he had heard about other operations, he was worried about what exactly the government would do if any of them did manage to identify the guy. If Abby had identified him then Gibbs knew he would have some serious decisions to make. He'd cross that bridge when he got to it.

"Yeah, you know, all hackers try to hack Eyes Only eventually," Abby continued to talk, either oblivious or ignoring Gibbs' distraction. "He's like a hacker god. So we all try to hack him, see how far we can get. It's a test. If you get to a certain level, he contacts you directly. Some of my friends are in his network."

"So you got to that level today?" He had to wonder why she was telling him all this.

"No, Gibbs. No, I didn't." She pouted. "Even with my brilliant new idea, it didn't work, he just shut me out. He's good, Gibbs, like me and McGee working together good."

Gibbs took that like a man and refused to flinch. It had been eleven years since she and McGee had worked together. Since the Pulse.

He refused to flinch and Abby didn't notice because she was still talking. "I had that exact thought: good like me and McGee working together. And then I thought, well, what if it was me and McGee working together?"

"McGee is dead, Abby." He spoke harshly. He couldn't help it. She looked stricken, paused long enough to take a breath and give him a hug.

"I know, Gibbs. But, still, what if it was us working together. That last project. We put everything we could think of on that laptop. We didn't know what they would face when they actually got there, so we just put everything we could dream up, the two of us and Tony, too, standing behind us telling us about Hackers the movie with Angelina Jolie. It was the last thing we all three did together. And my copy here was one of the things that I had a chance to protect before the Pulse hit. And afterwards McGee was dead and Tony left, but what we put together, it was a hackers dream, Gibbs, and it worked. Tony told us how it worked. It got them through all the security, it got them past every door, got them into every network, it worked, Gibbs. We were just too late. The launch had already happened but it worked, Gibbs."

"Then the Pulse happened. The laptop was destroyed."

"Gibbs, it was the last thing me and McGee worked on together."

He sometimes wondered how such a tall woman, taller in her platform boots, wearing black and chains, could look so innocent and vulnerable. He wrapped his arms around her in a hug. "I know Abs, I know."

"It was the last thing we worked on together. I recreated a copy. I kept it in a shrine for years." He stiffened and held her back for a moment to look at her face. She refused to meet his eyes. He sighed and pulled her back into the hug.

"You're always telling me that technology changes fast, Abs. That was eleven years ago."

"I know, Gibbs. That stuff wouldn't hack anything important now. But when we threw it together it was cutting edge. It was like a masters education on hacking. If someone had the time to study it, and wanted to spend that time studying it, and was really, really smart, well, they could learn a lot. And I think Tony made a copy of it before he left."

"DiNozzo returned to his family and became a journalist." It was one of his failures. Just another failure that he had sent DiNozzo and McGee and Ziva out and only DiNozzo had returned alive. His senior field agent had refused point blank to ever work with a partner again. What was left of their team had examined all the forensics, filed all the paperwork, attended all the funerals, and then DiNozzo had handed in his two-weeks notice and refused to take it back. He'd had three partners in NCIS killed in front of him, and Gibbs couldn't really blame DiNozzo for deciding it was enough.

So DiNozzo had returned to his rich reclusive family who didn't care about him and about whom he didn't care and taken up journalism so that he could continue to investigate without ever having to have a partner again. He'd even gone back to his father's last name despite having used his mother's maiden name for his entire adult life before then. Gibbs couldn't imagine DiNozzo agreeing to work with someone else, after leaving NCIS, but he supposed eleven years were a long enough time to change most things. And DiNozzo had been Cale for the last decade, and Gibbs didn't know Cale at all.

"You think DiNozzo got involved with Eyes Only and gave him the software."

"Tony would never do that, Gibbs! That software, that was me and McGee. Tony would never give it away."

Gibbs had not gotten to his reputation for omnipotence by making guesses. He waited for her to explain.

She huffed a sigh when he didn't guess again but didn't push it. "Tony wouldn't do that to us. He left because he wouldn't work with us anymore. He wouldn't give our work away to anyone else."

"I know Abs, those were my thoughts too."

"Good. But then how did Eyes Only get it? Don't answer that question, it's rhetorical. I know how. Because I thought Eyes Only looked familiar. And of course he looked familiar because I've been watching his hacks for like three years now, but then I thought of Tony and look!"

On her lab screen, the Eyes Only image shifted so it was on one half of the screen. The other half had a picture of DiNozzo and Abby, arms links together, smiling rather manically at the camera. Gibbs didn't have time to appreciate it, or mourn its loss because Abby was typing away at her computer, and the image zoomed in on Tony's face, then zoomed in again on Tony's eyes. Tony's eyes stared out at him from one side of the screen. Eyes Only stared out at him from the other side.

"Did the computer do the analysis?" Gibbs was surprised at how his voice sounded. It sounded normal. When he had opened his mouth, he hadn't been entirely sure he had the breath to speak.

"Yeah." But her fingers flew and the analysis happened again. Gibbs watched as the comparison points were identified and compared and matched. "Those are Tony's eyes, Gibbs. Tony is Eyes Only."


	2. Chapter 2

Gibbs hadn't had direct contact with Tony DiNozzo since the agent had left NCIS. His job was his life and his friends were his coworkers. He didn't know what to say to someone who wasn't involved with a case.

It was easy enough to date women because he asked them questions about themselves. They seemed to like that, at least at first. That approach would hardly have worked with Tony.

He'd be willing to talk to Tony about work, as he wasn't with the women he dated, but frankly that idea was so bad it made him grin. Outside of work he had his boats and there really wasn't much to say about spending another year sanding another boat. As time passed, it became impossible to simply pick up a phone and call Tony for no other reason than to feel his presence.

He knew Abby had stayed in contact with Tony. She sometimes mentioned talking to him or getting an email. He never asked her about it but he was pretty sure she knew he was interested. After all, he never called her to task about mentioning him or walked out before he had heard the news. Of course, being Eyes Only had never been part of the news.

"I can't believe he never told me!" Abby was incensed.

Gibbs found himself smiling faintly at the two images of Tony's eyes. Tony had always loved undercover work. Creating a man of mystery was just like him. Gibbs was just surprised the man hadn't used his horrible James Bond / Sean Connery accent for the voice.

He wiped the smile off his face before turning back to Abby.

"Get me a copy of every Eyes Only transmission there's been. I want them by the end of the day today."

"But Gibbs! Do you have any idea how many of them there have been?"

"Nope. But I'll know by the end of the day." He turned away to head back to his desk as she gave a despairing wail. The smile came back. "Oh, and I want copies of all the emails he's sent you, too."

"Gibbs!" Her wail was cut off by the door closing.

He was grinning as he jogged up the stairs. It was a good thing they didn't have a hot case at the moment because he intended to read up on everything they had on Eyes Only, and what exactly Tony had been up to over the past decade.


	3. Chapter 3

"Here's everything." Abby placed a CD on his desk. "They're short but there's a lot of them. I named them with the date and broadcast region. I haven't had a chance to really look at them because I got distracted by something else."

She hopped in place.

"Well, aren't you going to ask me what the something else is?"

Gibbs gave her a look, but then prompted her, "What's the something else?"

"I'm not sure if it's a good something else or a bad something else but it's odd."

"What is?" He was beginning to get impatient.

"The eyes are definitely Tony's. Irises don't lie. But just in case, I also did a voice match. It's definitely Tony. But here," she reached around him to bring up the picture on his computer. "Look at the skin around the eyes. There are actually fewer wrinkles than there were ten years ago. It's unusual but not unheard of, plenty of face creams say they can do that. But ten years is a long time and well, they've been a stressful ten years for most people. He's either got a really good face cream or there's something hinky going on."

"Maybe he's just cleaning up the image."

"Possible, but look." She reached around him again, and he gave up and just scooted his chair back, so she could have easier access. She enlarged the image so the entire computer screen was filled with a couple of square centimeters of skin. "Look at the pores."

"Oh, I'm looking." It was hard not to.

"Airbrushing smoothes over blemishes of all types and pores get included in that. To remove wrinkles but keep pores, especially at this magnification, that's a lot of work. And a lot of time spent on it. And for what? If you were going to change something why not the eyes or voice? That's what could be used for identification."

"Vanity? This is Tony after all. Or maybe he got a facelift."

"I thought of that. He could have had surgery, but that would leave small scars. They'd be real small and faint but I looked really carefully for them and they're not there. Scars like that would be easier to airbrush out than wrinkles but it's still time consuming. Of course, there would be a reason to hide that type of scar, because plastic surgery can be tracked. But if he's trying to hide that, it would still be easier to just use a lower definition camera to records. There's no reason to broadcast with this sort of definition if you're going to have to modify the feed anyway."

"Bottom line, Abby."

"I don't think the image is adjusted."

"Well, then what do you think?"

"Um…"

"Spit it out."

"The Pulse," she blurted and then froze at the look on his face. He didn't like to talk about the Pulse. She rushed on before he could say anything. "We know it was three attacks: missiles to five major cities, biological weapons in the atmosphere, and electromagnetic pulse in the stratosphere. But we stopped the first two. It was only the electromagnetic pulse that got away."

"Only. Only the electromagnetic pulse?"

Abby winced but didn't back down. She wasn't suicidal enough to respond to that, though, so she just ploughed on. "Ziva stopped the missiles, Tony stopped the biological." She stopped abruptly. It didn't matter. Gibbs could hear her continue in his head. _And you stayed with McGee, applying pressure to a mortal wound, helping him stay conscious long enough to talk DiNozzo and Ziva through stopping the final attack._

Abby took a deep breath. "We never figured out what exactly the biological aspect was. Both Tony and Ziva were exposed to it. Ziva died, Tony survived. The country had too many other problems to deal with to spend any time on a failed attack and me and Ducky were only able to confirm that it was a mutagen of some sort."

"I know this, Abby."

"I know you know, Gibbs. But you need to think about it more because it's a mutagen and we don't know what it does, but we do know that Tony's skin is odd for his age. And I haven't seen a picture of him in a really long time."

Gibbs sat extremely still and thought of the man who he had worked with for so many years. Tony had been active and vibrant and beautiful and just as much an ass as Gibbs even if it was in a totally different way. What did he look like that he was now only showing his eyes?

"I'll call Palmer."

"Okay. And Gibbs," Abby looked nervous again. "We really don't know much about the mutagen. We know Ziva caught it. Since Tony never showed symptoms, we assumed he didn't but now I think he might have gotten it. But here's the thing, you were also there and you never showed symptoms either, so we assumed you didn't get it."

He didn't let his response to that show. He just repeated himself. "I'll call Palmer."


	4. Chapter 4

They had been marines. The men who had destroyed their country had been marines and Gibbs found that betrayal almost worse than the destruction itself.

McGee had died before the Pulse had hit, but after they had known they had failed. Ziva had died of cancer within three days of the Pulse, the tumors practically visibly sprouting and growing.

Gibbs and DiNozzo had found the men responsible. It had been difficult to not simply kill them but instead the two of them had interrogated the bastards until they cried. Watching the bastards crumble had not brought their team back to life, and the answers it brought were not happy.

The marines had been part of a super-soldier project. Human experimentation that hadn't worked but had left them angry and betrayed and wanting to strike back at the country that had thought technology would improve them as soldiers. They had access to electronics and explosives and to the super-soldier drug cocktails that had so spectacularly failed on all of their cohort. Those soldiers had already survived war zones but then they had been dying from medical experiments and their sacrifice unacknowledged by a government that denied their very existence. So they had decided to share their experiences with the rest of the country.

It hadn't worked. They had managed to cripple their country and kill Gibbs' team, but they hadn't gotten the exposure they had wanted. Their very names had been removed from databases. Their motives and experiences actively hidden by high government orders. It was not the first time Gibbs had seen such a cover up, nor was it the last time.

It was, however, possibly the only time that he was going to ignore that particular order. In order to stay at least vaguely within the rules, he waited until Palmer was alone in the morgue.

"What can you tell me about the Pulse bio weapon?" He didn't bother with social niceties, and Palmer just about leapt out of his skin.

"Um. What?"

"The Pulse bio weapon. What can you tell me?"

"Boss, that's really classified stuff. No one is supposed to be researching that without layers and layers of government vetting and even then only in government labs."

"So?"

"So, I'm telling you that being able to answer your question is a good way to get charged with treason and made to disappear into the night one night." He thought back over that sentence. Into the night one night. No, that was right.

Gibbs was giving him the beady eye again, though.

"Does it mean you can't tell me what I want to know?"

Palmer sighed. "No, I can tell you. It just means that if I disappear, even if you get a wonderfully happy resignation letter talking about my new job for some brain trust out in sunny California, I want to be rescued."

Gibbs nodded. "Okay."

And that was that. Palmer looked like he wanted a bit more reassurance but this was Gibbs he was dealing with.

"Do you want the technical description or a more…" Gibbs give him the beady eye again. "Right. So, first off, it's a combination of things. A lot of the standard performance enhancers, maybe a bit souped up, but still pretty basic. The real reason for the secrecy is one element, that sort of looks like stem cells and sort of looks like HIV."

Gibbs would have interrupted at this point to say that that made absolutely no sense, but Palmer had paused as if waiting for him to make just that comment. Gibbs remained silent.

"I know that's seriously weird. I don't know how they did it, but those are the results I'm getting. It's invasive, pervasive, promotes growth that wasn't nearly as controlled as the creators assumed, plus making the recipient a lot more sensitive to the other drugs."

"In controlled circumstances, it was tested on fifty marines. Twenty of them died within the first few days, another ten within the month, eight more died within the next month." Palmer paused, looked at Gibbs, looked away, and then continued. "Of the twelve that were alive when NCIS invaded, five were killed resisting arrest, seven of them were taken alive."

"And none of them," Gibbs continued, "were left in our care long enough to do a medical examination."

The NSA had removed them all. Gibbs had spent seventy-two hours in jail for assault, but that record had been cleared up along with everything else.

Palmer took a deep breath before continuing. "Two other people were exposed, not in a clinical setting. One died within three days of exposure, the other showed no symptoms."

"The problem with narrowing down what happened and why is that the one survivor already had an incredibly complex medical history. He had been a very healthy child, and a talented athlete, and remained in good shape through being injured multiple times, being exposed to a variety of toxins, actually catching pneumonic plague, and then taking the drug cocktail needed to deal with that."

"He's not 'the survivor', he's DiNozzo. You know him."

Palmer blinked, brought back to himself. "Yeah. I guess I'm just used to hiding that fact when I refer to him."

And Gibbs practically pounced on him. "What? Who exactly are you talking to about him?"

"Look, boss, the information you want isn't something I could find by researching all alone in a medical examiners morgue, not even having access to Abby's forensic lab." Palmer had grown a backbone over the years and could stand up to Gibbs at need. It just wasn't often. Gibbs had to respect his opinion when he did. "I had to have other people's assistance. Or maybe they had my assistance. But I did what I could to protect Tony while at the same time figuring out what had happened to him so that I could help him if he needed it later."

"Who. Did. You. Talk. To."

Palmer gulped. He hated it when Gibbs did that. "Sebastian. Doctor Mallard helped me at first. Now, I work mostly with Sebastian. I don't know his last name, but he was a quadriplegic and he died last year. Since no one has come to arrest me since them and I know Abby's still gotten emails from Tony, I thing it was safe."

Gibbs glared, but it was half-hearted. Palmer was probably right about that. He went back to the original topic of the drug itself. "What could some of the long-term results be?"

"I haven't seen him in a decade. And I haven't been allowed to do the serious research this needs. The best I can do is guess."

"Then guess."

"Since it didn't give him cancer, one hypothesis is that he had enough internal damage already, scarring and the like, for the drug/infection to be kept busy healing his lungs for instance rather than spontaneous growth. If it's still in his system, and that's a serious possibility, it might make him more sensitive to some diseases and less sensitive to others."

Gibbs thought about that for a moment. That scenario certainly made it possible that he himself had been infected but also damaged enough for it not to matter. He decided not to ask Palmer about that after all. Instead he had one last question. "Could this effect skin tone? Act to remove wrinkles, that sort of thing?"

Palmer blinked at the nonsequitor but then shrugged. "Sure. That would make sense. And Tony was older than any of the other victims." Then suddenly the implication of the question must have hit. "Wait, does that mean you know something about Tony?"

Gibbs was already on the other side of the door by then, so he decided to pretend he hadn't heard the question.


	5. Interlude

Logan Cale didn't often think of Tony DiNozzo.

After the first year had passed and his physical form had stabilized and he had made the conscious decision not to worry about long term effects, he had simply become Logan Cale. He had enough practice with undercover personas, enough love of them really, that he found it easy to sink into the new person and simply not come up again. His own mirror helped him in that. His reflection showed him the young Logan Cale and none of the lines remained that Tony had earned through laughter and grief and pain.

It wasn't amnesia or anything like that. He hadn't forgotten. He still kept in loose contact with Abby after all. But then, Logan kept in loose contact with a lot of people around the country. His past just wasn't something that Logan thought about. He never signed the emails he sent Abby because he knew signing them Logan Cale would make Abby unhappy and yet he couldn't or wouldn't but certainly didn't sign them as Tony DiNozzo, about whom he didn't even think.

In ten years of living on his own, he had maybe woken up half a dozen times in the dead of night missing his old life. In ten years of investigating secrets and corruption, he had thought "What would Gibbs do?" exactly three times. It wasn't a lot, all told.

Why then, this summer, did these thoughts plague him?

After Max had died, Logan had gotten himself and the others out of there.

He had covered his tracks, and tended to the wounded.

He had tried to grieve but put that aside as a lost cause because he still could not quite believe that Max was truly gone.

So instead he planned and contrived and did all he could to start the process of tracking Manticore back to it's lair and destroying it completely. It took months.

At first, he stayed busy. There was always, always, always something more to do. But then, he started to make headway, he found a few loose ends to tease at, trying to track them back to their source. That was delicate work, and had to be done carefully, softly, and without rushing.

He wanted to throw things at the wall, things that would shatter, whenever he knew there was nothing more he could do but wait. And waiting became more and more common, as he needed to give his sources time to get back to him.

The first time he did in fact throw a glass of wine across the room, he had been immensely pleased with the effect and then horrified at the loss of control.

That was the first time in nearly a year that he thought back to his previous life.

When it happened before, he would always immediately turn his thoughts elsewhere. He didn't much think about Tony DiNozzo or any of Tony's friends or coworkers and that was a conscious decision on his part. This time, though, he went out to a bookstore and bought a copy of "Moby Dick."

It was a horribly boring book and he wasn't at all in the mood for reading even the most adventurous tale. None the less, he still read that thing slowly and carefully, making sure to read and understand every page before turning to the next.

Determination was good in an investigator but obsession was dangerous.

He wondered if this was how Gibbs had felt after Kate's death.

But Gibbs had had DiNozzo there to call him on it when his obsession grew too great. And now, well, Logan had a bit of DiNozzo left in him, too, because there was no one else there to call him on his own obsession. Not with Max dead.

Also, with Max dead, he was starting to develop lines on his face again. Maybe he was beginning to think about his old life more because his mirror was beginning to show him hints of his old face again. It wasn't Tony's face, of course. He'd been Logan for too long, and unlike Tony, Logan had more pain lines than laugh lines.

Max was dead. He watched her die. But he couldn't quite believe it. He had wondered if this was how Gibbs had felt when he had his gut feelings. When he had simply known something that all the evidence had been against. If it was, perhaps he owed his old boss an apology for teasing him about it. It was not a comfortable feeling.


	6. Chapter 6

A dead Lt. Commander had initially been identified as a tragic hiking accident. Her body had been found in the avalanche ruble. The bodies of her husband and infant child had not been. It was a tragedy, but no one could have survived that.

The initial theory would have been accepted if Gibbs hadn't played on a hunch and tried to track down the family doctor. A very healthy woman from a very healthy family and yet there had been two still-births with immediate cremations in the record, and a doctor who went missing after refusing to show them those records. Suddenly they had, not an accident, but a conspiracy theory that made no sense what-so-ever.

Three days of intensive investigation found evidence that the husband kept secrets, but no real hints as to motivation or intention. Knowing that they wouldn't get anywhere further without taking a break, Gibbs sent his team home.

"Ah, free time! What will I do with such a thing?" Agent Juarez had asked rhetorically as he left. He had left quickly, though, before Gibbs could do more than cast a quick glare at his senior agent's back.

Juarez could do whatever he liked in his free time; Gibbs knew exactly what he himself would be doing. Gibbs watched the Streaming Freedom Videos in his free time.

He watched them, back to back, on repeat. It was, perhaps, a good thing that he didn't have all that much free time.

Having watched all of the Streaming Freedom Videos for the first time within the first few days, he was now trying to research them all. They were short, but there were a lot of them. Over the weeks, he was spending what free time he had researching the background on those reports. That was proving a lot more time consuming than he could have hoped.

"Hey Boss, you need any help with that?" Juarez was back.

"No."

Having to do it in free time was frustrating. Having to do it clandestinely while working with a bunch of trained investigators was worse.

"You sure?"

"If I wasn't sure I wouldn't have sent you home an hour ago. What are you doing here?"

"I just couldn't help but notice that you've been researching extra cases. Mostly west coast. You're not leaving us, are you?"

"No. Now go home."

"Cause if you aren't looking to transfer, then you're working cases without your team."

Gibbs set his glasses aside and berated himself for having gotten soft enough to let his agent get away with this. Juarez had worn him down, though. He'd always had a soft spot for agents who stood up to him. They were rare and valuable and he fought to keep them on his team except for when he wanted to kill them himself.

Juarez took his silence as surrender. "So what are you doing?"

He may have even been right about the surrender because Gibbs found himself answering. "I'm identifying the events that Eyes Only has been reporting on."

Some of the incidents were shrouded in confidentiality issues. Twice he'd been visited by Fornell asking him what he was up to, trying to access the files he was. So far, he'd managed to send the man off with his questions unanswered. Those matters were frustrating but also rewarding.

Some of the incidents were straightforward and easily researched. Those were also the incidents which had a lot of information available to be reviewed. The more recent incidents were odd since the ones in the last few years seemed to involve some pretty experienced black-ops training being used. Whoever Tony had hired was very, very good, which was frustrating in and of itself since there were no real clues as to where he could have found a mercenary of that caliber.

What were just plain frustrating were the few other broadcasts that were clearly intended to communicate with a specific audience. Gibbs was not part of that audience, but he was determined to understand them.

"Eyes Only? You intend to catch him?" There was an open warrant out on the hacker. More than one actually, along with a decent bounty, but Juarez spoke completely impassively. Gibbs would have to talk with him later about his poker face, because his impassivity was a clear sign to anyone who knew him that he didn't approve. In this case, though, that was good to know.

"No." He didn't add any explanation.

"Oh."

Gibbs turned back to his computer as he left the agent to think. He surreptitiously made a copy of the flash drive on which he'd kept all of his notes connecting Eyes Only broadcasts and case files. If Juarez wanted to help Gibbs research but not capture Eyes Only, then Gibbs was willing to use him.

"So, can I help?"

Gibbs smothered a grin and tossed the agent the duplicate flash drive.

Maybe the other agent would have some inspiration regarding the bar codes. Or maybe an inspiration regarding a dead Lt. Commander and missing husband and infant. Gibbs would take which ever, preferably both.


	7. Chapter 7

When the case finally broke, it all broke at once. There was maybe an eight hour period between the time the first crack appeared and the time it was shattered into a million different pieces and revealed a whole new level of problem. Despite the fact that Gibbs had thought he was working on two different cases—a dead Lt. Colonel and Eyes Only's mysterious bar codes—it turned out they were simply different perspectives on the same case. So when one broke, they both did. And it all broke with one of Abby's more annoying idiosyncrasies.

"Okay, Gibbs?" Abby had been hesitant like she was when she was planning to say something she knew he wouldn't agree with. "You said you think it's a conspiracy, right."

"No. I didn't."

She rolled her eyes at him. "Well, you didn't exactly say it because you don't say things like 'conspiracy' because you think it's dumb, but you still think it. I know."

That was all true enough. Gibbs ignored it and let her ramble on.

"So I was exploring the deep dark world of conspiracy theorists and wow are there some crazies out there, but there's this one conspiracy theory, it's about bar codes. They say the military was developing super soldiers in test tubes and they were all identified by bar codes tattooed onto them. And Eyes Only did talk about "their cover being compromised." That sounds super-soldier-y, right? Supposedly they're super strong and fast and possibly have x-ray vision although I'm not really sure how that could possibly work, but it would still be really cool. I'd like to have x-ray vision. I wonder what sex would be like if you could see into the other person?"

That was definitely something to think about. Not sex with x-ray vision, but the possibility that one of Tony's more cryptic broadcasts was regarding a super-soldier project. Given his experience with it, Tony would investigate those kind of rumors.

But that was for later, after hours. During the workday, he had a Lt. Commander's mysterious death to figure out. Although the super-soldier aspect did give him a possibility that he hadn't really followed before.

The avalanche in which the Lt. Colonel had died had been massive and incredibly deadly. It had been clear to even the most suspicious person that no one could have survived that sort of experience, and certainly not uninjured. All the evidence showed that the husband and child had been there with her. Gibbs had spent a lot of time trying to find evidence that he hadn't been.

But what if the husband _had_ been there? And what if he _had_ survived uninjured?

It was a remote forested mountain. There were only so many routes back to civilization. With a conspiracy going on, Gibbs assumed there wouldn't be any need for hitchhiking with strangers who might be convinced to talk. Of course, he only assumed this after he had tracked down any and all possible rides.

The husband's doctor's cell phone records led them to a local sheriff's office; the sheriff's office gave them a patrol car; the patrol care led them to a mansion; the mansion still contained six people, including the missing husband and infant child.

Despite the rather absurd series of connections, it had all been relatively easy to track down once Gibbs had accepted that not only were some of the people involved stronger and faster than normally possibly, they also had all sorts of secret conspiracy connections.

Figuring out who was lying about what and then convincing them to refrain from doing so was a natural talent and much-refined skill of his. The thing with conspiracies was that it allowed an interrogator to play the different people off of each other. And once he had them in cells, it was all the easier.

Capturing them had been difficult, but he'd warned his team to assume strong and fast and to shoot first if they felt threatened. Two of the suspects had been killed but he'd gotten three of them arrested and confined, including the husband of his Navy Lt. Commander .

Feeling generally malicious, he'd also had them all strip-searched just for the hell of it. The fact that he had actually found matching decorative scarring on them all meant that he had a retroactive excuse for doing so and didn't even have to deal with a chastisement for unnecessary abuse of prisoners. Those scars also gave him a starting point for the interrogations.

He'd had Palmer check his prisoner's reflexes.

Reflexes were wonderful things in that they were quite literally reflex. They couldn't be hidden. Gibbs' entire team had stood by, weapons aimed and ready, as they watched the prisoners attempt to stop their own reflexes.

They had spectacularly quick reflexes.

The process had also given him a chance to analyze the prisoners. He'd chosen to start with the husband.

"You're wife didn't have those kinds of reflexes."

The husband had remained silent.

"She didn't have a barcode either." Still silent, but this time the guy twitched. It was small but it was something.

"Of course, neither do you. You have a scar. I suppose it could be covering up a tattoo. Wouldn't want anyone to think you were owned."

That clearly struck a nerve. "It's not covering up a tattoo. That should be obvious."

Gibbs hid a smile with practice. The guy didn't want anyone to think he would have something as lowly as a tattoo. It was a definite weak point. "Of course, maybe you didn't rate a unique identifier like a tattoo. You just got a makers' mark, I suppose, just like all the others." The man glared but didn't speak.

"So were you grown in a vat? Not much of one for a home life if you don't even have a mother." He provoked. "Your son has a mother, though. Well, had one, at least."

The man was seriously indifferent. It was infuriating, but Gibbs held back. Interrogations broke the suspect not the interrogator.

Gibbs had left him to stew for a while he regained more control of himself. He spent some time with the other prisoners. They also got defensive about having scars but not tattoos, but they didn't care nearly as much about the kid. It was pretty clear that they didn't care about anyone who didn't have a matching scar, not even a kid. It made Gibbs even more sure that some kids didn't pass the "test" that gave them the scar.

It gave him enough to information to go back to the father.

"Your friends don't think your kid will survive. He's probably too weak. After all, your steroid use didn't keep you out of trouble, did it?"

The man sneered but didn't comment on the fact that it was clearly not steroids that had changed him.

"Of course, you weren't good enough for a barcode so it doesn't really surprise anyone that you failed so miserably here." Oh yeah, Gibbs thought at the suspect, get angry. You're already upset, but get angry, lose control. Tell me how wrong I am. He kept talking. "Your son, too. Don't worry, I'll send him somewhere nice, to some nice family who'll take care of him and make sure he doesn't feel too badly about never being able to earn a scar."

"He'll get one! We take care of our own!" The mention of a test definitely set off Gibbs' instincts. A test for an infant, one that left a scar, would be bad. He left it alone for now, though. He'd get back to it later.

"Oh, but he's not one of you, is he? After all, there's no scar on him yet, is there? And his mother was too weak, wasn't she?"

"She doesn't matter!" The man practically screamed.

"Of course not. She wasn't part of the cult, after all. No scar on her. Certainly no tattoo."

The man practically turned purple.

It was everything that Gibbs could have hoped for in an interrogation. The man was proud of his actions and his cult and, once he broke his silence, it all spilled out.

He was nothing like those miserable freak-of-nature transgenics! He was part of a millennia-old breeding program! He was pure! He would inherit the earth! He would inherit it soon! Soon Gibbs and all the weaklings like him would be dead in the coming plague! His son was not a weakling!

The case he had found was cracked open entirely. He had a suspect in custody with means, motive, and opportunity who was confessing. But instead of resolving anything, solving the case just showed exactly how much trouble they were still in. Because for all that the man's ranting reminded Gibbs of an over-the-top Hollywood-villain plan, it was still utterly terrifying.

He left the man still ranting in the interrogation room.

As soon as the door closed and locked, he shouted, "Palmer! Go study the bodies downstairs. Get Abby samples of everything you think of. See what exactly their immune system can take that most people can't."

This wasn't a terrorist cell _just_ trying to bring down the government. This was a cult that was seriously trying to commit genocide on the entire human race. He could hardly make himself believe it was true and yet he couldn't quite convince himself that it wasn't either.

It thoroughly pissed him off.

It pissed him off that a Lt. Commander of the U.S. Navy had been murdered by her own husband because "she had fulfilled her role of birthing a third child" and after that was "an extraneous distraction."

It pissed him of that a suspect's threats of widespread plague was becoming more credible by the moment.

And finally it pissed him off that, despite all of the reasons to be unhappy, he was actually pleased to have a valid reason to track down DiNozzo.

It all pissed him off.

He scheduled a transport for himself and his team to Seattle, Washington.


	8. Chapter 8

Gibbs had managed to fall asleep on the military transport despite the fact that there was a major terrorist attack threatening humanity at large and the fact that he would be seeing DiNozzo in a few short hours. One of the lessons learned in the Marines: sleep when and where you can, your next chance may not be for a long time.

He woke up ready for a new day, carefully hiding his smirk at his poor beleaguered—and now exhausted—team. Under the circumstances, he would take his amusement where he could get it, since that too would be unlikely to come again soon. But he would avoid rubbing their noses in it.

Having woken, though, he found he was just as glad for having missed any conversation as he was for the sleep. Landing on an Army base, NCIS didn't have quite the same pull as Gibbs was used to. The soldier escorting them actually tried to be chatty. Even worse for him, he started off a conversation with, "So, are you here to deal with those mutant freaks?"

Gibbs hadn't quite believed his ears. His own team all took a step back when he stopped where he was to slowly turn on the soldier. "What?"

The soldier hadn't realized the thin ice he was walking on. "It's in all the news. The mutant freaks escaped from some military lab. I guess it was a Navy lab, huh? Since NCIS is coming to deal with it. Although I would have thought they'd send a regiment or something to take them out."

Gibbs had enough experience with anger to have learned to speak through it. "What exactly are you implying, soldier?"

The soldier seemed to finally have caught a clue, at least. He started to look nervous. "Er, sorry sir." He was not nervous enough, though, since he kept talking. "Just everyone on base has been talking about it. Which branch did it, and who's going to be mopping it up."

Gibbs knew perfectly well that he had been angrier than he was now at various points in his life. With the rage currently filling him, though, it was hard to think of that. "Everyone on base is talking about who's going to be assigned to kill American soldiers?"

"Sir! They're not soldiers! They're transgenic mutants! They were built in a lab."

"They're soldiers, soldier. And if they were built in a lab, then they didn't even volunteer for it."

"But…"

"Let me get this straight, soldier: your suggestion of how to deal with a bunch of underage draftees is to deny them retirement?"

Agent Juarez apparently felt it was time to save the idiot. He interjected, "And were not given the right of informed consent to the enhancements made. Boss, Doctor Palmer just emailed me his first review of the research."

The news at least distracted Gibbs from his rage. "Well?"

"The DNA contains pieces from a lot of different sources, but each soldier had a base DNA that was pure human. He theorizes that the base human DNA came from the researchers on the project, so once we have samples from the transgenics, we should be able to track down who their, well, parents were." Juarez smirked at the soldier who had been blatantly eavesdropping. "So, solider, you may not want one of these mutants to marry your sister, but what if one of them is your sister?"

It makes Gibbs wonder what Logan Cale will think of Juarez. DiNozzo would have either loved him or hated him. "Anything else, Juarez?"

"Uh, yeah, Boss. Abby emailed a video file. She marked it as urgent but we'll need a computer to access it."

"Soldier. Computer, now!"

The soldier finally figured out his role, and took them where they needed to go without further comment.

It might—might—have gone a little way towards calming Gibbs down if the video from Abby hadn't been like a follow-up punch. She had sent him an Eyes Only video that had aired while they had been in transit.

For the first time in any of the videos, Eyes Only's eyes turned away from the viewer. His eyes flicked to the side, then his whole head turned to the side. "Alright people, this is the last you're going to hear from me for a while. Stay strong. Peace. Out."

By the time they finally reached Logan Cale's apartment the FBI had already been and gone. Looking at the evidence strewn site, bullet holes in everything, Gibbs thought that the FBI team had either been overworked or incompetent and most likely both. At least there wasn't any blood. Yet.


	9. Chapter 9

The first order of business was to present himself at the local FBI office to see what was happening. The memory of seeing Fornell see him in Seattle for the first time was enough to make Gibbs laugh.

"What the hell are you doing here, Gibbs?"

"Hello, Fornell, how are you doing?"

"Oh, I'm just trying to figure out what to do about a bunch of transgenic supersoldiers. Since I know none of them are Navy, what is NCIS doing here?"

That distracted Gibbs from any mention of Logan Cale's residence. "You _know_ none of them are Navy?"

"Yup. They're all strictly Department of Defense private contract work. The contract went to a program called Manticore, founded by a man named Sandeman. Sandeman disappeared some years ago."

"That hasn't been made public."

"No, it hasn't. We tracked it down after Aimes White's testimony. Aimes White, who happens to be Sandeman's son."

"I don't remember hearing that in the public testimony." Gibbs commented, mostly rhetorically. "Aimes White. You do know he's up to something, Fornell."

Fornell snorted. "I've been at this just as long as you have, Gibbs."

"Put our cards on the table?"

"The elevator's over here." Fornell smirked as he led the way. "Sure. What do you know?"

Gibbs waited to answer until the doors were properly shut the emergency switch flicked. "I know that the transgenics aren't the only hyped-up people wandering around. There's another set, some long-term breeding program, that hates the transgenics even more than the rest of the civilians do."

"Ah, I should have known you were aware of them. Aimes White is one, so was Sandeman before he disappeared. What we tracked down. White's been trying to play us and I've been letting him for the time being, because I haven't figured out what he wants, aside from a bunch of dead transgenics."

Gibbs almost smiled. Fornell looked like middle-management; like some worn-down businessman waiting for retirement. Better men that Aimes White had underestimated him before.

The amusement drained away fast, though. "I'm not sure why the transgenics are important to them, but the plans I've heard involve large scale murder, some type of bio weapon, only the guys like White are breed for immunity."

"Shit." Fornell stared. "You're not joking."

"No."

"Shit." He was silent for a moment. "Well, that explains what you're doing here, at least. That's not exactly something you'd trust someone else to track down."

Gibbs smiled briefly. He wouldn't have survived this long in this type of career if he couldn't find humor in the darkest of times. "Nope. It would have been enough to bring me all on it's own. But actually, I came for DiNozzo. He's gotten himself a whole bunch of really interesting contacts in this city and at least one well-armed group out to kill him."

"You do like to ruin my days, don't you, Gibbs?"

"Just putting my cards on the table."

"DiNozzo's quite the ace up your sleeve. Ten years undercover?" Fornell shook his head. "You really are a bastard."

Gibbs didn't bother denying being DiNozzo's controller. That interpretation might come in handy later. And he certainly couldn't deny being a bastard. "Let me know if you see him. He's fallen off my radar."

"In this mess? Not surprising." Fornell even looked moderately sympathetic. Running undercover agents was hard on the nerves. "I'll let you know. Keep me in the loop if you find anything."

The elevator was switched back on. "Will do."

What followed was an absolutely miserable two weeks.

The city was caught between race riots and martial law, the government was infested with conspirators for who knew how many conspiracies, and Gibbs himself was stuck waiting. He hated waiting.

The nearby Navy base was quickly learning to hate Gibbs waiting, too. They had enough problems to keep him occupied and their brigs full. There were real crimes and real criminals and real victims, and yet Gibbs couldn't help considering it all busy work for his team.

DiNozzo was good enough at what he did to remain hidden until he could set up another base. There would be no way to track him until he chose to reveal himself to the public again, although Gibbs had made a few contacts requesting a meeting with "Eyes Only." It was a long shot and mostly involved more waiting.

Abby and Palmer were busy running every test they could think up on their prisoners back in DC, trying to figure out that apocalypse scenario, as Abby insisted on calling it. Gibbs hated the phrase. He had pointed that out to Abby in one of his check-in phone calls. She had restricted him to only three calls a day. He hated that rule, too. He'd mentioned his hatred of that rule to Abby, too, but she had laughed and then told him that if he wanted the information then he had to let them work on it.

So he waited.

Fornell finally called. "Nice of you to tell me that DiNozzo has some upgrades of his own."

"What?"

"I just saw him jump over a car. And he's remarkably young looking. I wouldn't have recognized him if hadn't given me the heads up."

Gibbs didn't know what to say about that.

"Do you want to know where he is?"

"If you saw him jump over a car, then I'm guessing he got away and you don't know where he is."

"He's holed up with a bunch of transgenics at Jam Pony central. And Aimes White is here with a surgical strike military team not wearing any uniform I recognize. And I'm playing least in sight at the moment. If you want to stop this, you'd better get here soon."

Fornell hung up. Gibbs refrained from destroying his cell phone.

"Shit, DiNozzo. You had better hold this all together or I will kill you myself."


	10. Interlude

Logan held on to Max's hand with a strength that would have hurt most girls. Max may not have even noticed. There was something incredibly hot about strong women, but at he moment he just needed the grounding that grip could give him.

Looking at the flag of Freak Nation he felt hopeful and worried and like there were a thousand things to do and that he wouldn't' be able to manage it at all. Just the thought of it all made him nauseous and despairing. So he kept his grip tight and focused on the hope.

It would be enough. They would be enough.

They had to be.

He'd had that thought before, that "they had to be enough." Of course, it had been a different "they" and it hadn't even been true. They hadn't been quite enough.

McGee and Ziva died and the country had still been devastated.

He'd walked away after that.

Gibbs had accused him of running away, but it hadn't been. It had been a thought-out decision, made carefully and correctly. He had finished everything that he could, completed the proper paperwork, and only then turned his back on who he had been and walk away, calmly and decisively. And he had done it all because he couldn't bear being responsible for stopping attacks and being part of a team again. Being a vigilante was better. The closest he came to teamwork was trading favors. The only responsibilities were the ones he accepted, the ones he knew he could take. It was a good life.

For the first six months of being Logan Cale, way back when, it had felt like acting, like being undercover. That had been fun. But then he had let himself sink into the role in exactly the sort of way that an undercover agent had to struggle against. He let himself go completely under, and ten years later he was Logan Cale, through and through. Aside from sporadic contact with Abby and Palmer, no one he knew even knew about Tony DiNozzo.

And yet, Logan Cale found himself back in the same situation as Tony DiNozzo had been in. There he was, staring at the waving flag of Freak Nation: part of a team, responsible for the lives of these soldiers, and clutching the hand of a strong, beautiful woman whose death would break him.

He felt a desperate urge to walk away again. Instead he tightened his grip on Max's hand. This team was still alive and fighting and he'd be with them to the end.

He just wished he had a better sense of whether "the end" was in a few minutes, in a hail of bullets; in a few weeks, in an apocalyptic plague; or in a few decades, of old age, having accomplished everything that flag promised, or at least a good start at it.


	11. Chapter 11

Gibbs finally got through traffic to Jam Pony just in time to follow the whole cavalcade to the abandoned area. He was growling under his breath as he parked and fought his way through the mob at the outer perimeter. Juarez was silent and watchful in his wake, apparently having decided that the better part of valor was to stay silent and not make a target of himself for his boss' wrath.

Finally, he made it to where Fornell was directing operations. He'd only had to—or only gotten to—punch out two people to get there.

"DiNozzo's in there," Gibbs stated rather than asked. Actually, he practically shouted it, in order to be heard over the crowd.

Fornell answered it none the less. "Yes. Yes. On the upside, I finally got to arrest that idiot White. He's being taken back to headquarters to be interrogated. Why don't you go there and help out with that."

It was a blatant brush off and Gibbs treated it with all the derision it deserved.

"Could this day get any more complicated?" Fornell inquired at the sky.

Gibbs eyed the flag being raised over the compound before them. "You should know better than to ask that." He pointed. "I think they just declared independence."

Fornell sighed. "Declared independence with a couple of city blocks entirely surrounded by the rest of the US? Lovely."

"Well, they do have an army." Juarez piped up.

Both Gibbs and Fornell glared at him until he stepped back with arms raised. Fornell snorted and turned back go Gibbs. "And yet, there still aren't any Navy personnel involved. What are you doing here? And what is DiNozzo doing? A ten-year undercover mission is a bit much."

"It wasn't a mission. He got into this all on his own."

"You sure you want to tell me that?"

"If I change my mind, I'll let you know."

"Because," Fornell spoke right over Gibbs. "It would be real nice to have an agent inside who I could talk to."

Gibbs laughed. "Okay, get me a bullhorn."

"What, you can't just shout over it all?" Fornell mocked. They could barely hear their own conversation over the crowd, and he was already waving for an underling to bring over a bullhorn.

Once Gibbs had it, he stalked to the fence. "DINOZZO."

It wouldn't exactly be a heart-warming scenario, the sentimental meeting of two estranged almost-friends. His third wife had a thing for Hallmark movies. This would have been the perfect plot for one, Gibbs thought, if only the characters were different. Gibbs didn't really do warm sentimentality. That might have had something to do with the break-up from wife number three.

A minute passed by.

"DINOZZO. GET YOUR ASS OUT HERE."

And then there he was, jogging out of the building towards the fence line. Gibbs walked to meet him. DiNozzo looked half-way pleased ad half-way annoyed, just as he always had when Gibbs had summoned him to his side. Seeing him, Gibbs couldn't resist: "Took you long enough."

"Hey Gibbs, long time no see. I'd say that you have changed a bit except, well, you've somehow managed to become even less subtle than you were before. Calling for me by DiNozzo?"

DiNozzo paused but Gibbs didn't reply.

"I know you know my name."

Gibbs still didn't reply, just looked at his old partner.

With fake cheer, DiNozzo said, "Hi! I'm Logan Cale." Then he fell silent and just started back. The ball was in Gibbs' court. He took his time responding.

Physically, DiNozzo looked younger than Gibbs could ever remember seeing him. Even when they had first met and DiNozzo had given him that grim that made him look about five, DiNozzo had still had faint crows feet at the corners of his eyes. Those lines were no longer there but the smile was gone too. Physically, DiNozzo looked younger, but Gibbs had no trouble at all remembering that he was older now.

"What the hell have you gotten yourself into this time?"

DiNozzo, no, Cale looked a bit affronted but after a moment, answered back. "Oh, just trying to stop crime and corruption, just like always. Under the circumstances," he grabbed the chain link fence between them and rattled it to make the point, "I'd say that my position is fairly clear. The question really is, what are you doing here?"

His third wife would tell him that now was the time to say that he had come to help DiNozzo. It would even be true. There was a reason why his third wife had divorced him. Gibbs answered truthfully, "There's some breeding cult that's trying to start a plague. They say it's going to start in the Seattle area."

There was a flash of something on Cale face. Disappointment, maybe? Something sad, certainly. Gibbs' wondered what Cale had expected, then brushed the thought aside. Whatever it was, Cale clearly brushed it aside as well. He looked intent. It had been that look that had first drawn Gibbs to the cop way back when. That was the look of someone with a lead or two and ideas of how to get more.

"The breeding program is the Familiars: thousands of years old, cult-like, with definite hierarchy but no single leader that I know of. One member, Sandeman…"

"Broke off from the rest and started Manticore." Gibbs interrupted, completing the sentence.

Cale blinked with surprise. "Where are you getting your information? Are you psychic? I think I'd believe it if you said yes." Gibbs ignored that and Cale continued. "So if you already have the background, I've got a few addresses of places you'll want to check out. There's a private school and a sanitarium that both seem to be central meeting points for the Familiars, not to mention the old Manticore compound."

"Give the addresses to Juarez."

Gibbs waved his agent forward but didn't bother to provide introductions. He wasn't entirely sure what introductions he could have provided. There was a tense moment before the two both switched to pure professionalism. It was definitely Logan Cale who gave the addresses along with directions and advice. Juarez wrote it all down without comment. He even bit back the reply he had wanted to make when Gibbs told him to go check out all three locals and then report back. Cale watched it all with studious impassivity. Whatever he was thinking, he wasn't making it public knowledge.

They both waited until Juarez was lost in the crowd again.

"Cale, what are you doing?"

"Making a difference. These guys have been majorly screwed over. They need a chance at justice."

"And you think you can get it from inside a compound?"

"I think they're a lot more likely to get it from in there than they would if they were out on the streets getting lynched."

It was a good point, Gibbs had to admit. He was clearly not made to be a negotiator. He was more inclined to shoot his way out of situations and this wasn't the type of scenario that could be fixed by violence. There was too much of that going on already.

"Do you at least have a plan?"

"Gibbs, what makes you think I'm the one planning any of this?"

"You're twice as old as most of them and have a hell of a lot more experience in this kind of thing." It was obvious. Who else would be in charge?

"I doubt there's anyone alive today who has experience in this particular kind of thing. But more to the point, I'm not a transgenic, Gibbs. I'm not their leader, I couldn't be even if it were needed. A non-transgenic leading them would negate the whole effort. I just help out."

"If you're not the leader, then who is?" That was at least a significant bit of information. Gibbs castigated himself for assuming that the transgenics were either leaderless or following DiNozzo's lead, er, Cale's lead. It's just that, from the outside at least, they sure didn't look organized. So either they were as disorganized as they seemed or they were organized by the person who had made a career out of being a wildcard. But apparently there was someone else.

Cale smiled and it was almost as wildly happy and partially insane as DiNozzo's had been. "Max. My something."

"Your something," Gibbs repeated.

"Yeah. My something. Maybe girlfriend?"

"You're something all right. Are you going to invite me in to meet your something?"

"Maybe. Why do you want to? I already told you what I know about the Familiars."

"No, you didn't." It wasn't an accusation, just a statement of fact. Gibbs wasn't even positive it was accurate, but he was pretty sure that Cale had kept something back. There was an obvious connection between the transgenics and the familiars, something that Sandeman, the founder, had wanted and that the Familiars hadn't. Gibbs would bet a great deal that Cale knew what that thing was.

Cale shrugged. It was as close to an admission as Gibbs was likely to get at this point.

"There's also a bunch of soldiers in there that need the sort of help that I can give."

"You're not exactly the negotiator type, Gibbs. What makes you think that you'll be able to convince those soldiers to accept your help. And what makes you think that whoever's in charge on your side will let you speak for them."

"Well, on my side, it's Fornell."

That surprised a laugh from Cale. "Fornell. God. I hadn't thought of him in years. But you two certainly had a way with each other."

"And on your side, you can vouch for me."

Cale went silent and watchful. The easy camaraderie drained away and the fence between them suddenly much more present than it had been before. Gibbs refused to back down from demanding loyalty more than a decade out of date.

Finally Cale nodded. "We'll have to see about that one. But for now, come on in."


	12. Chapter 12

"You didn't ask me to surrender my weapon," Gibbs commented blandly.

"Don't you mean weapons, plural?" Cale's response was just as bland.

"Yeah. You're not that careless."

"Gibbs, you're walking into a stronghold filled with transgenic soldiers. There's probably only three people in the whole compound who couldn't make you eat your weapon if they wanted to." With that reassuring little thought, they reached an entrance and Cale ushered Gibbs in.

The first person he saw was a young woman in black motorcycle leather. She was lovely. She was also real unhappy with someone and Gibbs was willing to bet that someone was Cale.

"So, what's DiNozzo?" The young woman asked with obvious suspicion.

There was a fraught moment, and then Cale answered calmly, "It's my mother's maiden name. I was using it when I first met Gibbs."

"They don't know about anything you did as DiNozzo? That's a lot of secrets from you friends." And there was clear evidence that Gibbs was not cut out to be a negotiator. Here he was, supposed to be trying to gain the trust of the transgenics, and instead he was eroding the trust they already had for the one person who might have been willing to vouch for him. On the other hand, getting them to air their own issues would give him a chance to see the lay of the land before starting the negotiations.

Cale spoke to both of them when he said, "I didn't tell anyone in DC about Cale and I didn't tell anyone here about DiNozzo. That's what makes a clean break."

The woman who must be Max did not seem appeased by this lack of explanation. "A clean break? Sounds like a lot more than a simple cover name. That sounds like you had a different life entirely."

"It was before the Pulse. A lot of people had different lives."

Max looked even less happy with that explanation, but this time she pulled Cale away to a corner to interrogate him in semi-privacy. Gibbs was left standing in a large warehouse surrounded by transgenic soldiers, half of whom were outright staring at him, the other half of whom were carefully pretending not to be watching him just as closely.

Gibbs looked around at all the transgenic soldiers. "Huh."

His first impression was that they were oddly inhuman. One man was albino, another had scales. One man was clearly more closely related to canine than humans were supposed to be. One woman appeared to have gills on the side of her neck. Several of them had slitted eyes, several more had claws. The more details he took in, the more off they were: he could understand why the public found them scary. And yet, the more he looked, the more he also saw their humanity.

They were curious and scared and hopeful and worried.

They weren't children, not now and possibly not ever, but they were still kids. He'd had to grow accustomed years back to the fact that, from his perspective, most soldiers were kids. The transgenic soldiers weren't any different in this from any other soldiers. Maybe their faces looked a bit younger and their eyes a bit older than most but that wasn't surprising. What did surprise him was the realization that Logan Cale, this remake of Tony DiNozzo, fit in here.

He was hiding secrets and pain and more experience than he should have. It should have made him a loner. Instead it helped him fit in all the better. Gibbs had to be amused.

DiNozzo had always been a people-person. It looked like Cale was too, whether he wanted it or not.

Gibbs suspected that Cale had more of a leadership role in this whole thing than he thought.

While the leaders had their pow-wow in the corner, he meandered amongst the rest of the soldiers. He would have loved to discuss their experiences and figure out more about them, they weren't going to be telling him any secrets anytime soon. He focused on telling them why he was there and what he wanted to do for them.

"The first thing to decide here, is what you want out of this. Complete independence from the US isn't it. Because as nice as it sounds, these few blocks of industrial building aren't self-sufficient. You need water, you need food, and you need income. So if you're not going to declare independence, what is it that you do want?"

"How about not getting killed on the streets." There was mockery in that, and a few people laughed. It was the dark humor of soldiers still at war. They didn't think he could offer them safety on the streets. Gibbs was determined to offer them that at the very least.

"I agree. What about veterans' rights?"

That actually surprised them into silence.

"I think you should get them. What about retirement benefits? Pensions? Those will be more difficult. In part because they are given in relation to time served and rank earned and all of your records are destroyed or sealed. Partly, though, because the government doesn't have that much money." That got a laugh.

"No, duh."

Gibbs grinned, then continued. "What I do think is possible is disability payments."

"Don't lie." The girl that Cale had been arguing with interrupted. Apparently that argument was over so here she was picking a new one.

"I'm not."

Max raised an eyebrow. It was one of the other kids who responded: Alec. "You really expect us to believe that you can get us all of this stuff, these rights?" It was not a real question, but heavy with mockery and hidden pain.

That made Gibbs angry. Not with Alec, whose eyes were pinched with old betrayal at odds with the mocking smile. He was angry with Max for having so easily snuffed out the flicker of hope that had been in his audience.

"Yeah," another kid commented, "the last time someone called us home to safety, it was an ambush with machine gun fire to the gut."

"You had a lot of really crappy commanders and I will be taking names and filing charges. They'll be dishonorably discharged and go straight to prison. But yes," he stared at Max, " I expect you to believe that I can and will take care of you within the system."

Max waved his words away. "Sure. I get that." Surprisingly she really did seem to accept it. Her casual acceptance communicated itself to the rest of his audience and they calmed down.

Alec was the exception. He pushed back at Max while Gibbs watched. Gibbs was still trying to figure out the leadership dynamics of this group. They weren't a standard military group, they weren't even a standard civilian group.

"Last time we trust anything they didn't even offer a merciful execution. And you believe this guy when he talks about pensions?"

"Yes, I do. I believe he means the offers he's making and he might even be capable of delivering them. But he also said he was here to resolve this situation, our situation. And I don't believe that for an instant." She turned to Gibbs. "So, what are you really after?"

She had managed to catch him completely off guard. He had almost forgotten the threat of plague. He had told them dozens of truths about what he wanted for them today and she was calling him on the single lie he had told. Shit. Within three minutes of meeting them he had known them for experienced and suspicious black-ops soldiers. Lies would be caught, and once found untrustworthy, he'd have a hell of a time getting anywhere with them ever again. Truth was important. At least Max was giving him a chance to explain.

"I came to Seattle because of a group called the Familiars are planning on spreading a plague. I walked into this building, though, to help you soldiers."

Max didn't say anything as the other transgenics murmured amongst themselves. Gibbs suddenly realized that the people he had identified as leaders—Max, Cale, Alec, Joshua—they weren't leaders, not in the traditional sense of the word. They were like judges or cross-examiners in a court of law. Final decisions were made by the jury. And the jury, in this case, were the rest of the transgenics, the ones he had been talking to casually as he waited for the leaders to negotiate. There was a reason why Gibbs was part of NCIS and not JAG, and it had nothing to do with not being a lawyer.

Finally, one of the transgenics lounging in the back snorted loud enough to be heard over the rest of the whispered discussions. He was a big guy with some sort of desert reptile DNA evident in his skin and face. "So a lot of normals are going to die soon. Works for me. We're a lot more likely to be treated decently and left alone if we're a footnote for some bigger disaster."

One of the others who looked regular human spoke up. "Only if the bigger disaster doesn't get blamed on us, too."

"So what do we do? Do we want to stay out of it or help deal with it?" Gibbs couldn't see who had said this. "The normals might not like or want us, but the Familiars want us crushed. And if they succeed, they might be powerful enough to do it."

"Hah, we can hide among them just as easily as we can hide among the normals."

"Yeah, and look at how easy that turned out to be."

"Speak for yourself, X-5. Some of us don't exactly fit in with normals or Familiars."

The argument raged, but in a rather controlled manner. Gibbs noticed that the guys he had first identified—Cale, Max, Joshua, and Alec—were all staying out of it for now but were keeping a watchful eye. If the debate got out of control he was pretty sure one of them would step in. What was most interesting, was that the issue of believing in Gibbs' own offer seemed to have been decided within moments. The argument was now on what they should give him in return.

He hadn't been expecting that, but it pleased him. Semper Fi.

Then one person's voice caught his attention. "We'll it's not like any of us are in danger from the plague. We're all as immune as any Familiar."

He hadn't been expecting that either. He turned to look at Cale who was looking right back at him. Cale had known they had an immunity, and he hadn't told Gibbs.


	13. Chapter 13

While the majority of the soldiers were still arguing, Alec casually strolled over to where Gibbs was watching.

"So, Gibbs, is it?"

"Yes. And you're Alec." It was a statement rather than a question. The implication was that Alec knew perfectly well what Gibbs was called.

The man merely smiled. "I'm sure we'll all be very grateful for your help, and we'll probably even help you with the Familiars because, well, they want to kill us even more than the rest of humanity does. But I want to know, how did you find out about them?"

The tone was flippant but there was a lot hidden under that flippancy. Gibbs suspected deeply ingrained distrust.

"I was investigating a murder. A man killed his wife and took his son to a cult safe house. During the interrogation, he implied the end-of-days were coming and only those like him would survive. His physical abilities made the threat credible."

"You interrogated a Familiar? And got him to confess?" Real respect showed through at that as Alec tried and failed to appear disinterested.

Cale had wandered over, too, and he was just as startled. "You tracked and arrested a Familiar. And actually managed to break him in interrogation? Of course you did. I forgot who I was talking to." Cale's eyes sparkled with amusement.

"You planning to do the same to the rest of the Familiars? Arrest them, interrogate them, put them in jail?" Alec asked.

Gibbs considered him in silence for a moment. There was something behind that question that he wasn't getting. Finally he shrugged. He'd figure it out eventually. "Yes."

"No," Cale immediately contradicted him.

Gibbs was about to argue back when he realized that it wasn't Cale who was looking him dead in the eye. It was DiNozzo. It was his old second-in-command who had the knack of calling him on his actions when he got tunnel vision. Instead of arguing, he stared hard at his old partner, challenging him to either explain or back down.

"After thousands of years, they're planning on killing off everyone else. That they haven't before but are now, means that they couldn't for some reason. Most likely reason is that they needed outside sources of genetic material. That they are planning on it now, means there are enough of them to be a self-sufficient population. We're talking tens of thousands of people at the very least. More likely millions of people."

Gibbs found himself stating the obvious. "We can't arrest or even detain that many people."

"No, you can't. Not to mention that they're an international cult, and many of them are in powerful positions."

Alec snorted derisively. "Given that they're trying to kill us…"

"You better not be about to suggest killing millions of people identified by their bloodlines."

Alec shrugged, not put off at all by Gibbs' glare. "If arresting is out of the question, then just kill them. It's easier that way anyway."

"Absolutely not. We will not have another holocaust."

"Not even to save the rest of humanity?" Alec challenged.

"It would damn the rest of humanity faster than any plague could." Gibbs spoke with certainty. There would be politicians who would propose just such a holocaust, he was sure. Of course, they wouldn't call it a holocaust and they'd probably try to keep it as quiet as possible. But he would make them back down. He'd be damned if he'd let his country or his marines turn to genocide.

"Under the circumstances, I would have thought," Gibbs abruptly stopped. He'd been planning on saying that Alec shouldn't be proposing the killing of anyone genetically different from standard human. Any such argument would almost certainly be turned on the transgenics themselves. He would have thought Alec was smarter than that. In fact, he did think Alec was smarter than that. His perspective shifted. Alec wasn't trying to convince him to commit genocide; he was testing Gibbs' willingness to support such genocide. He spoke dryly, "You can stop testing me now."

Alec got the meaning, but merely raised an eyebrow. "Can I? If our positions were reversed, would you stop testing?"

Gibbs had to laugh at that, but softly. "No."

Alec wasn't the only one doing the testing. Gibbs was trying to figure out these transgenics. And Cale stood right there watching everything.

Time to change the subject for a bit. Plus, maybe it was time to poke at who Cale was, now that he wasn't DiNozzo.

"Cale, the supersoldier serum worked on you after all?"

Alec perked up at that. "Supersoldier serum?" But Gibbs kept his eyes on his old partner.

Cale just blinked in surprise at the abrupt conversational shift. "Uh, no. What makes you ask?"

"Fornell told me about that jump you made outside of the Jam Pony building. Leaping over a car?"

Cale shook his head. "No. I've got prosthetics on. The toxin had some obvious cosmetic effects, and I think it fixed my lungs, too. As a youth serum it would be worth a fortune if it weren't for the 99% death rate." Gibbs was fairly sure that was intended to be a joke but he couldn't see the humor in what had killed Ziva and from the look of the grin Cale was attempting to fake, he couldn't either.

"Er, guys? Did I miss something? Supersoldier serum?" Alec prompted.

"It's nothing," Cale said. "I was exposed to a toxin some years back that killed everyone else who was exposed, but appears to have mostly made me look younger than I am. It was supposed to make super-soldiers."

Alec laughed. "Sounds like an epic fail."

Cale shrugged.

Gibbs ignored the interchange completely. He wondered why Cale was wearing prosthetics at all. Dating a transgenic soldier, most men would want to have something let them be at least as strong and fast, but DiNozzo had never had that particular type of ego. He only seemed to get serious with women who could overpower him one way or another. Although if he knew he was going to get into a fight with a bunch of transgenics on one side, and a bunch of Familiars on the other, he supposed it would make sense to try to match them. Still it wasn't the sort of thing DiNozzo would have done. Maybe it was the sort of thing that Cale did.

Something to think of later.

For now, though, there were more important things to think about. "We can't arrest the Familiars and we're not killing them," Gibbs stated, trying to get the conversation back on track. "What's left is stopping them."

"You got it, B-," Cale started out strong and impudent but stuttered halfway into calling Gibbs 'boss'. "Gibbs."

Gibbs felt a twinge of satisfaction that this stranger still had DiNozzo's habits at least to the extent of calling him 'boss.' He ignored the feeling. "Stop them releasing the plague or find an inoculation. Not exactly an easy proposition, either of them."

"I say we do both." Max spoke from directly behind him and Gibbs barely managed not to jump. She was smirking as she strolled around him so that they could all see each other.

Cale smiled at her but she stared at Gibbs. Alec rolled his eyes.

Gibbs wasn't sure what the whole backstory was to this relationship but it looked like it would fit in with all of the other messed up relationships that DiNozzo had had: first falling for a woman while undercover, then for a fellow agent who was also a Mossad assassin. "And do you have a plan for how to do both?"

Max ignored his sarcasm. "Of course I do. Logan says you have an agent looking for the Familiar's Headquarters. And I have an inoculation."

Gibbs just stared at her, waiting for more.

She seemed to wilt a bit. She was definitely a leader, but she was also still quite young and he had a lot of experience dealing with smart but young. "Okay, I think I have an inoculation."

"How?"

She hesitated only a moment but then tossed her hair back. "I'm pretty sure Sandeman designed me to be an inoculation. The Familiars have been really interested in my DNA sequencing."

"Almost all of the later generation transgenics seem to be immune to whatever it is the Familiars are using," Cale explained. "But we've had some interesting evidence regarding Max's particular genetic cocktail. The most likely explanation is that Max's blood hold an inoculation rather than just an immunity."

Gibbs nodded his understanding. He wasn't sure what the evidence was, but really medical details weren't his specialty. He had experts for that. "Can I get a sample to send to Abby?"

Max glanced at Cale first, but at his nod, agreed. "Sure. Now?"

It was a simple matter to find a syringe, get some blood, and take it out to Fornell to send to send to Abby. He gave her a quick call to let her know what was coming. At least it was supposed to be a quick call but once she realized that Cale was right there, she insisted on speaking with him. He finally abandoned his phone with Cale and Cale to Abby.

Alec migrated back to his side.

"So what was he like?" Alec asked the question that Gibbs had been expecting from Max.

"DiNozzo?"

Alec rolled his eyes. "Logan Cale aka DiNozzo, the man of apparent mystery. What was he like when you knew him?"

Gibbs smiled at the question but after a moment decided to answer. "Childish, irreverent, always flirting or teasing, always quoting movies. He could irritate anyone in 60 seconds or less."

"Logan? Are we talking about the same guy? He of the mature responsibility and dutifulness?"

"Oh yes. It was a special skill of his. I once saw him being interrogated by the head of Mossad. DiNozzo irritated a confession out of his own interrogator in less than two minutes."

Alec laughed aloud at that. Cale glared at them suspiciously from where he was talking on Gibbs' phone.

Gibbs smiled.


	14. Chapter 14

They'd been up all night, and Logan was working on putting together a computer communication system so that they could talk with Abby via video rather than a cell phone that was short of power. It was decidedly odd to see Tony, of all people, working competently at fixing up a computer system. Gibbs liked computers just as little as he ever had, but Logan seemed to really understand them.

"I can see why you have trouble with Alec." Gibbs spoke casually. That really should have been Logan's first clue. Gibbs didn't really do casual conversation.

"He's an ass."

"Hmm. He reminds me of this guy I used to work with: Tony DiNozzo."

Logan gave an offended squawk. "He does not!"

Gibbs smiled.

Logan gave him a suspicious look but then abruptly and with no subtlety what-so-ever changed the subject. "We should be able to talk to Abby now, and she should have received the stuff you sent her."

Back to business, Gibbs tucked his humor away. "Connect me through."

A few minutes later, a wavering image of Abby in her lab stabilized into clear and lovely definition. Abby looked up with a big smile.

"Tony! It's so good to see you!"

"Hey, Abs. You, too. You look wonderful. I love the new tat." Logan was in full charm mode. Max was looking decidedly jealous but Abby knew better than to be distracted by a bit of flirtation.

"I've been so worried, especially since I realized, well, that you do what you do, and then I analyze the pictures, and Tony, you're all you but different now."

"Yeah, I'm Logan now, Abby. Not Tony."

"No, you're Tony. You have to be. You—" Gibbs cut her off at that. If left to her own devices she could go on a five-minute rant and Logan would probably let her.

"Abby. Did you get the samples?"

"Hey, Bossman. Yes, I did. But we're not through with this, _Tony_."

"Yes, you are." Gibbs stated. "What did you find?"

"It's weird. The blood samples you sent me are all weird because, hello, transgenic, but weird even for that. Jimmy's been helping me go over them, but I actually recognize a lot of it. Gibbs, I they were using my research. I never should have accepted that contract. I thought we'd fixed everything when you put Sergeant King in jail, because then none of the bad guys got a hold of it. But the US still had it and now they're the bad guys, and, and Gibbs, it's my research! They were using my research to do bad things to people!"

"Yes, Abby. I know. But we're going to use it to save people now."

"Really?"

"Yes, really. Now tell me about the weirdness."

"Okay, since there hasn't been much time, I've just been comparing the blood samples to each other and to a couple of samples of base human. There are a couple of genes that all the transgenics have and that none of the base humans have. I focused on those. One of those genes is treated the same way by all the transgenics except for the one labeled Max."

Logan smiled. "Excellent. We have evidence that while all the transgenics are immune to a particular disease, Max was actually made to carry an inoculation."

"That's what I thought. It's odd because, well, people don't generally come with things made that easy, but well, it was the only explanation I could come up with for the way that particular gene was treated in Max. But…" Abby trailed off.

"But?" Gibbs prompted her.

"So there's an artificial gene that's been tacked on to the original gene. Well, mostly tacked on to the carrier gene that's holding the original gene. And wow, that sentence got a bit involved."

"Yes, it did. Why don't you try saying it again."

"Well, see, the one gene, I'll call it the immunity gene, see all the transgenics have it, right?" Abby didn't wait for a response, just took a deep breath and continued. "In Max, it's attached to another gene, that's the one I worked on. It's a carrier gene, something that would allow anything that's attached to it to be spread. Right? So it's dangerous but it doesn't really do anything on it's own, it just allows other genes to tag along. Are you with me so far?"

She actually waited for a response this time. Gibbs was almost tempted to see how long she'd wait because she was practically vibrating. However long experience told him that she was hopped up on enough caffeine to kill a herd of elephants and if he wanted her to continue working, he'd better not push her too hard. "Got it."

"Well, there's another gene attached to the carrier. It's not present in any of the other transgenics, and it actually seems to be some sort of artificial virus. I'm not sure what it's supposed to do."

"Hmm." Gibbs considered that. "Did Juarez send you what he got?"

"Yeah, but it's messy. A bunch of random papers. It shows that they were doing research regarding the immunity gene but don't really have enough to figure out what they were doing more specifically. I haven't found anything regarding the second gene, though."

"Can you remove it?"

"Gibbs! You should be amazed that I've even been able to find it. The fact that I've identified three different genes in a single night; it's miraculous. Hanging out with nuns has clearly helped my karma. I've got serious know-how but what you're asking for is impossible. Or maybe not impossible but really, really hard and time-consuming. Hundreds of man-hours. And we're on a tight schedule here. Days! I can't do that in days. No one can. Not even one of the major labs."

Logan finally spoke. "Don't worry about it. I know what the extra gene does."

"Really? What? Cause Jimmy has been muttering and banging his head against the wall and I finally had to kick him out of lab because of that gene."

Logan smiled, but Gibbs had a feeling that there was something off about it.

"I'll bet. Max was designed specifically to be an inoculation. The bad guys sort of piggy-backed off of that. They gave her a specially designed virus coded to a specific DNA. A lot of man-hours spent on an assassination: Ziva would definitely have disapproved. But we know it works."

"Logan!" Max had stopped looking jealous and now looked furious. Gibbs wondered who had been assassinated that way. He tried not to think about what it would be like to be used as an assassination tool as she had been.

"Not now, Max. Abby, I'm sending you some more research. Just see what you can do about making the carrier gene airborne and capable of being released to the general public." He typed something, obviously emailing her some more documents.

"Tony, that's, well, that's sort of terrorist activity. Making an airborne pathogen…"

"I know. But it's the bad guys who are making the pathogen, we're just spreading the inoculation."

"Can we just make it a regular inoculation and send it to the hospitals?"

Gibbs answered that. "No time, Abs. The bad guys in this case are highly placed, they could stall this until it's too late."

"I guess."

"You can do this. Hurry."

"I can do this. Yes. Of course, I can do this." She nodded once with military determination, clicked her heels, did an about-face, and marched off to another area in her lab space.

Logan smiled fondly before breaking the connection.

"Logan," Max sounded agonized. Gibbs stayed still and silent, wondering what he had missed, hoping that he was about to find out. Luck was with him, as Max didn't even glance in his direction. "Don't do this. You can't."

"With the whole world at stake? Or at least regular old humanity? That's several billion people, you know. And you shouldn't care about what I do. Isn't that what you said? I lied to you, I hid my past. You don't know me, so how can you care?"

Logan was obviously quoting her words back to her, and it came across like a slap to the face. Even Gibbs knew better than to do things like that to an upset woman. Tony should know that that was a sure fire way to drive a woman away.

"Yeah. I shouldn't care. You'll find you're death one way or another. Not my problem!" She turned and walked away with studious casualty. Gibbs recognized the style: his fourth wife did that. The argument was similar too. Tony _would_ know it was sure to drive Max away.

Gibbs finally spoke up. "Logan."

"Yes, boss?" Gibbs let the 'boss' part slide. He had been Tony's boss, not Logan's.

"You made Abby think the assassination attempt was successful."

Logan dragged his eyes away from where Max had stormed off and turned to look at Gibbs. "Yes, I did."

"But you're the target, aren't you? You wear medical gloves whenever you touch Max. You're asking Abby to kill you!" The more he thought about it, the angrier it made him. Abby would be devastated.

"Tell me then, Gibbs. What are my other options?" Logan looked him dead in the eyes, serious and challenging. Tony had done that sometimes. It had been rare but always important.

They needed to distribute this antidote as soon as possible. They didn't know when the plague would be released and they couldn't stop it. They needed to released the antidote and give it a chance to spread through the entire world population before the plague did the same thing, killing people as it went. It all needed to happen yesterday if not earlier.

There weren't any other options and they both knew it.

Gibbs walked away.


	15. Interlude

Whoever said what didn't kill you made you stronger was a damned liar. At this point in his life, Logan had come to the realization that what didn't kill him would still manage to kill some part of him, leaving less to go on with.

He sat in a wheelchair that someone had dug up from somewhere or other. His back hurt if he spent too much time in the prosthetics. He wondered if this counted as too much time. Because his back ached if he spent more than an hour or two at a time in the prosthetics, but if he spent _too_ long in them there would be actual damage beyond mere discomfort.

He was pretty sure that Gibbs hadn't realized why he had prosthetics on his legs yet, but that reprieve was due to end soon. If he pushed himself, he could probably continue the charade of being whole and capable for another day or two but it would do permanent damage for temporary illusion. He'd never been that particular type of idiot. Even knowing he'd never do it, he still thought of it with longing. He'd left Tony DiNozzo behind so many years ago. Now Gibbs had dragged that old version of him back.

It was good that Gibbs was here. Logan could trust him to treat the transgenics well, and deal with the Familiars. He could probably also leap buildings in a single bound, back when that meant something and wasn't a skill that most of his acquaintances seemed to have. It was a good thing that Gibbs was here, but it still hurt.

Logan thought he'd gotten over his need for outside approval back in those first years after the Pulse, seeking comfort from his family. He'd found the comfort of wealth and routine without the comfort of warmth. It had been enough. Now, though, he was discovering that maybe he'd only discovered that he didn't care about approval from people who didn't matter. Somehow, someway, Gibbs still mattered. He'd always wanted Gibbs' approval. He didn't want Gibbs to see Logan as less than Tony.

Too late now. He'd sown his wild oats when he was younger, and now he was paying off the karmic balance. Having once been the ultimate love-them-and-leave-them ladies-man, fate sure was doing it's best to emasculate him now. Not only the loss of the use of his legs but also being unable to touch his girl friend without dying a horrible death? It was a bit extreme. And now Gibbs, one of the few people who he still wanted respect from, would know.

The only thing to do was laugh. His life was like a roadrunner cartoon. Someone or something was always out to get him. And they were always ludicrous, over-the-top attempts, too. People shooting at him or blowing up his cars barely even counted as serious attempts when compared to living through the bubonic plague, paralysis, and genetically-specific viral attacks. Now, though, there was an apocalyptic event coming and the only inoculation was poisonous to him. How was this not a farce?


	16. Chapter 16

"Palmer." The doctor actually sounded bright and chipper on the phone which was enough to make Gibbs glare. Unfortunately, his cell phone didn't allow the glare through to it's intended destination. Another fault in modern technology.

Palmer would have just gotten in from a good night's sleep in his own house. Possibly even had breakfast. Gibbs had managed a few hours of sleep stretched out on the floor of an industrial warehouse, in the middle of a siege, and hadn't even had coffee.

"Doctor." It was all the preliminary that Gibbs was going to give him. "Abby identified three genes: a carrier, an immunity, and a third one. That one is a virus. I want you to come up with a cure by the time Abby has the immunity ready to release."

Even without knowing the science behind it, Gibbs knew perfectly well that it was an unreasonable request. He'd found over the years, though, that making unreasonable requests sometimes got you impossible results. He would push his people to their limits and beyond.

He smiled through Palmer's dismayed squawk.

"I've been trying! I've been working on this thing for three months!"

His smile vanished as if it had never been. "What?" He could hear the quiet danger in his own voice and he hoped that Palmer heard it to. The doctor was lucky to be several states away.

"Um..."

"You've been working on this for three months, Doctor Palmer?"

"Umm.."

Gibbs let the silence speak for itself. Palmer had a vivid imagination. He should be able to figure out exactly what Gibbs was planning to do to him for keeping this little bit of secrecy and how much worse it would be with every additional second that passed.

"Logan asked me to! There was this assassination attempt on him and he sent me blood samples and asked for my opinion. But I'm just a medical examiner, not a geneticist or immunologist or anything. And his blood work is complicated even beyond the regular. I told him I'd work on it but he should keep looking. It's just too bad that Sebastian died. He was amazing."

"Keep working. I except a solution in three days." He hung up. Palmer should count himself lucky that Gibbs had snuck in a couple of hours of sleep. If he'd just had that discussion after being up for 36 hours, the man would not have survived. If Cale was lucky then he'd done the same because Gibbs had a few more questions for him, too.

Gibbs circulated a bit looking for his target. Cale wasn't at the main computer hook-up or with any of the larger discussion groups. He wasn't scrounging for rations.

Gibbs finally found him asleep in a chair. The sight gave Gibbs a bit of cognitive dissonance remembering the many times he'd seen the younger/older DiNozzo asleep in his office chair. Then the memories were pushed aside by the series of realizations that didn't come in a blazing moment of understanding but were instead a devastating cascade of minor discoveries. Oh.

Cale was sleeping in a wheelchair of all things.

Many of the people in the warehouse had made beds or cots for themselves wherever they could. Cale wasn't the only one in a chair. He was, however, the only one in a wheelchair.

Next to him was a set of leg braces. They were high end electronic doodads, but not military grade. Gibbs had a suspicion that if Eyes Only had wanted military grade equipment, he could have gotten it. These were not the sort of thing that soldiers wore to supplement their own strength and power. These were the type where all the nerve connections were at the waist.

These were intended for use by parapalegics.

Ignoring the fact that the bottom of his stomach seemed to have fallen away, Gibbs stalked up to the sleeping man and slapped him on the back of the head. "Wake up!"

Gibbs watched with studied dispassion as his old partner jerked awake in the chair. Cale had to grab the arm rests to keep from sliding out of it. He didn't use his feet to support or even brace himself. Once he was settled he looked up at Gibbs with wide eyes, still sleepy and vulnerable.

And then all the vulnerability went away. Just like that, it was replaced by determination and arrogance. A lifted eyebrow was a challenge. "What?"

"When were you going to tell me?"

At least Cale didn't pretend he didn't know what Gibbs was talking about. "When would you have needed to know?"

Gibbs could feel his lips press together with anger. DiNozzo had been crippled or disabled or whatever the current PC term was. He always needed to know things like that. Abby didn't know. He wondered if Palmer knew about this, too.

"Are you dying?"

Cale looked surprised at the question, which in turn surprised Gibbs. After all, his old partner had been crippled, but Gibbs still didn't know how it happened. What had caused the damage? If it were that old Pulse bioweapon still working away, Gibbs rather thought he would descend into a homicidal berserker rage.

If it were something else, it wouldn't be as bad. If it had been someone else's fault, that person had just better hope he was already dead before Gibbs got to him.

"I was shot. A bit of bodyguard work that didn't work out so well." Cale shrugged and the casual unconcern was so patently false it made Gibbs' heart ache.

"I thought the Pulse bioweapon worked on you."

"Given the evidence, I guess not."

At this rate, Gibbs wondered if his glare would just become permanent. Changing tactics, Gibbs said, "I just spoke with Palmer. Apparently he's known about your little virus issue for three months now."

"And I appreciate his help."

That finally broke Gibbs control. He started cursing. He paced back and forth, clenching and unclenching his fists, and just swore straight for at least three minutes. He wasn't sure who he was more angry at: Palmer, Cale-slash-DiNozzo, himself, or just the world in general.

Cale sat back in his chair and simply watched.

When Gibbs finally got himself under control, he was almost glad that the flush of rage covered the blush of embarrassment. He couldn't think of what to say.

Cale waited for him to say something and Gibbs couldn't think of a goddamned thing. Finally, Cale apparently took pity on him.

"I had an idea."

Apparently he'd had an idea while Gibbs was busy throwing a temper tantrum. Didn't that make Gibbs feel ever so much better. At least Cale wasn't directly pointing that out, at least not yet. He waited to hear more; he wasn't going to ask.

"As I see it, we have three problems. We have the immediate problem of the plague that the Familiars are planning to spread. We have the more long-term problem of the Familiars as a secret society trying to kill off the rest of humanity. And we have the self-evident problem of currently being under siege."

Gibbs noticed that the problem of the virus was not mentioned. He supposed an argument could be made that, in the grand scheme of things, that was a more minor problem. On the other hand, Gibbs would probably punch anyone who tried to make that argument to his face. He grunted to acknowledge of the three main problems but waited to speak until he'd heard what the actual idea was. It was possible that Cale was less prone to insane ideas than DiNozzo had been but he wouldn't bet on it.

"Abby is working on the plague side of things. So we have figuring out how to disarm the Familiars and free the transgenics. And I've got a way to do both." He grinned. And didn't say what his idea was. It was a long five minutes of trading grin for glare before Gibbs finally gave it.

"How?"

"Well. People are scared of the transgenics because they're tougher and more dangerous than your average human. So we need to find a way to show that they're not any more dangerous than anyone other stranger. In the mean time, the Familiars gain half of their power through secrecy. No one knows that they even exist, much less who and what they are." He grinned again. "So we out the Familiars. To the general public. Just tell everyone everything and sit back to watch the various card houses fall."

Yup, Cale still had DiNozzo's sense of strategy: crazy.

"You think giving the public another horror story is going to make the panic go away? It would just make it worse. Add a witch hunt where not just the transgenics get burned."

"Ah. But I don't want to start a witch hunt." Cale was still grinning wildly. "We're not going to tell the public a horror story, we're going to tell them a fairy tale. The big bad government was mean to the poor transgenics and but the good and virtuous Familiars are there to save the day. The transgenics aren't villains, they're victims made because the government was jealous of the secretly persecuted Familiar society which is just as strong as the transgenics and work hard to make the world a better place. We're going to tell people that there are superheros amongst them, hiding for fear of their lives. And that they should identify these people, and shake their hands. And that the poor transgenics just want to live a life where they don't have to be assassins to these good and virtuous humans."

Gibbs blinked.

"You mean, reassure the public that they aren't the transgenics' target, reassure them that there are good guys to save the day, and hobble the Familiars with paparazzi."

"Exactly."


	17. Chapter 17

Gibbs had made his way out to the barrier to talk with Fornell through the chain link fence. The crowd had already settled down. One benefit of the city having been under quasi-military control for some months now was that it wasn't considered that odd to have military barricades in the middle of the city.

Plus, the Streaming Freedom Bulletin that Cale had just broadcast nationally had probably distracted a lot of people from the barricade here. Fornell didn't look any less harassed, though.

"You take positive delight in making my life more difficult, don't you?"

Gibbs had to smile at that.

Fornell apparently took that as agreement because his scowl deepened. "Do you know what that broadcast of yours did?"

"What makes you think I had anything to do with an Eyes Only broadcast?"

"Are you seriously trying to tell me that you didn't?"

Gibbs conceded the point. It would have been a real unlikely coincidence.

Having won that point, Fornell continued with his rant. "Yesterday, I had an arrest: a man charged with everything from treason to domestic violence and murder. Today, I have a folk-hero and rumors of government cover-ups."

Gibbs shrugged. This, at least, he could argue. "That's nothing new."

Fornell sighed. "Yeah. I'm keeping him locked up for now, but you know that the politicians are going to win this one."

"They always were. Eyes Only just hurried it along."

It was true. There had been too much public information supporting White's role as whistleblower, and too much private information being used as blackmail, for White to have ever been successfully convicted of anything. Still, Gibbs could definitely sympathize with Fornell's frustration. Every day that he had White in his control was an extra chance to interrogate him.

"At least he put out a reasonable spin on the story, although it would have been better if the government weren't being cast as the bad guys. Again."

"Well, maybe the government deserves to be cast as the bad guys," Gibbs snarked. "Again."

It was intended as mockery, but Fornell only looked at him contemplatively. Gibbs refused to look away, but he could admit to himself at least that he wanted to. He had never told his old friend about the Pulse and Fornell had never asked. But sometimes he wondered how much Fornell knew or had guessed.

Whatever his thoughts or suspicions, though, Fornell once more refrained from voicing them. Instead he changed the subject back to the topic at hand.

"The broadcast didn't resolve anything."

"No, but it did create a distraction."

"And a plausible excuse. A couple of plausible excuses."

"Are you going to make me ask?"

"Would it work?"

"No."

"Then I've already discussed it with the higher ups. We're going to maintain the barrier around the transgencis' blocks, but the Office of Refugee Resettlement is being brought in to evaluate the long-term options. But basic needs will be provided immediately: food, bedding, medicines. You'll need to make arrangements to receive supplies and services. This is just for now. Nothing has been officially decided."

"It's good enough for now."

"It had better be, because I'm done with arguing about it. We got the report from Ms. Scuito."

Gibbs glared. "What?" He hadn't even gotten a report from Abby yet. What was the FBI doing with one?

"You thought you'd be able to release an airborne pathogen to the general public without anyone else noticing?"

"No, I thought I'd let everyone die instead."

"It may have been a necessary plan but it should not have been secret. You're just lucky that you're sequestered in there and weren't able to attend any of the meetings that you inspired. And lucky that I was on your side: I refused to talk about it until the transgenic issue was resolved, at least temporarily."

That really was above and beyond the call of any friendship. Gibbs took a moment to contemplate it. He spoke sincerely. "Thank you."

"Hmph. You're welcome."

After a moment, Gibbs had to ask. "So, how was my court martial?"

"It's waiting on you." Fornell spoke dryly. "But in the mean time, the CDC has been brought in and looked over everything. They modified the carrier to build in some controls and have their own antidote. They've also acquired some Familiars to work on regarding the original plague. Some of the Familiars are even volunteers."

"Could we simply stop the release of the original plague?"

"We're trying, but it doesn't look likely. Even the Familiars who are talking to us willingly apparently don't know exactly when and where it's all happening, and they say the ones in charge are not the type to change their minds."

"It is still a cult."

"Yeah. Anyway, there's a working prototype of the pathogen that Ms. Scuito was working on with the CDC but they're still working on improving it and don't intend to release it until either it's perfectly safe and the FDA have passed it for general consumption…" Fornell paused to allow them both to laugh at that prospect, "or the plague has struck and we absolutely have to."

Gibbs considered that. It was probably a good idea, but, "Do we have any idea of the incubation time of the plague? Or how we'll identify it's first outbreak? Or even if the immunity will act as an antidote after the plague has been caught?"

"Under the circumstances, does it matter? The CDC has it in their control and you wouldn't know what to do with a Petri dish full of something even if you had it in your hands."

True.

"It means we'll have little to no warning when it's actually being released."

"Yes?"

Fornell both confirmed and asked the significance at the same time. Gibbs realized that the man still didn't know about Cale's situation. It was probably for the best. "Will I be allowed out anytime soon?"

"Whenever you'd like. But I find it useful to have you in there and you're going to have a lot of questions to answer whenever you do come out."

"What about Cale? DiNozzo? Could I send him out?"

"Why? He getting on your nerves?" Fornell's teasing did not quite cover his suspicions. "Isn't he of particular value in there?"

Gibbs blinked as innocently as he could. "I may want to send him to Abby." To Abby's lab, really. Or Palmer's. The NCIS building was still capable of holding someone in isolation from airborne pathogens. Now that the bigger issues were being dealt with, it was time to worry about his partner again.

Fornell looked supremely unconvinced. "If you want my help with that, you're going to have to give me a better story."

"I'll let you know if I decide I need your help then." Gibbs snarked. But then actually felt obliged to soften the comment, because truly Fornell had done wonders getting what he had. "Again: thank you."

Fornell rolled his eyes. "Get back in there and negotiate deliveries."

"Yes, sir."

They exchanged another set of smirks through the fence before each heading back to their own tricky negotiations.


	18. Chapter 18

The transgenics clearly had a way of listening to people even at the barrier. None of them bothered to ask Gibbs what had been said and they were all a lot more active than they had been, racing around and preparing for the influx of resources and discussing what they could expect and whether or not they'd be able to place requests. Gibbs had gotten so used to thinking of them as regular soldiers that it was startling to recall that they were severely enhanced.

He left the busy transgenics to their work and settled himself in an out-of-the-way corner to watch.

Watching them reminded him once more that they were soldiers. They were as patriotic as any other soldier and more than many. Maybe that patriotism had originated in brainwashing, but it was still there. They wanted to have faith in their government, and for their government to have faith in them. The promise of supplies was more than just about supplies for them, it was also a sign that they hadn't been abandoned. The government which had commissioned their very creation and spent years training them still cared about them, at least a little. It was depressing how much that raised the moral of these betrayed children.

Considering what was happening around him distracted him from noticing what wasn't happening. It took him too long to realize that he didn't see Max anywhere. Too long, because as soon as he realized that he didn't see Max, he also noticed that Cale wasn't visible anywhere either.

The dog-man Joshua was currently directing the chaos with a bit of assistance—or at least commentary—from Alec.

Since Alec was one of the few people not obviously and actively doing something, Gibbs made his way over to him.

"Where's Cale?"

Alec looked surprised. "Shouldn't you be out there making sure Fornell heard the news?"

That froze his blood where it was. "What news?"

Alec frowned and said thoughtfully. "Huh. I guess we were all so busy with our own problems, we forgot to let you know."

"What. News?"

"Oh, the plague was released. In Queets of all places." Alec shook his head in confusion. "Queets, for crying out loud. Probably to make sure it goes international as soon as possible. Well, at least the CDC has an antidote."

Gibbs had enough experience to know that the next few minutes would be better served gaining new information than spent racing around spreading incomplete information, but he really wanted to be doing something other than questioning Alec. "How did you find out about this?"

After all, the transgenics were supposed to be isolated from the community. They were under siege, after all.

"The Eyes Only network has been keeping an eye out for certain symptoms. Logan got the call while you were out chatting. The hospitals have already noticed that something's wrong and have sounded the alert." He shrugged. Gibbs' wanted to sock him one, but refrained, at least in part because it would be unlikely to actually connect.

Instead, he called Fornell on his cell phone. He spoke as soon as the call was answered. "Queets, Washington. The hospitals should already have contacted the CDC, but double check."

"Already done. Now let me get back to my job." The call clicked off. It was abrupt and would have been rude from anyone else, to anyone else. Gibbs and Fornell understood each other. Necessary information was passed on and confirmed and there was no time or need for niceties. That taken care of, there was still the immediate issue of where Cale had vanished to.

Gibbs hated repeating himself, but, "Where is Cale?"

"Hmm?"

Alec still wasn't doing anything much but neither was he paying any attention to Gibbs. Gibbs stomped around the boy until he stood right in front of him. Gibbs knew that Alec could be a dangerous person but he had lots of experience dealing with dangerous people. It was more important to cow them than to actually be more dangerous. Alec was a hard one to cow, of course, but Gibbs would make his best effort.

"Where. Is. Cale?"

"Oh, Max took him to a safe place."

"And where is this 'safe place'?" Gibbs spoke through gritted teeth. Sadly this seemed to amuse Alec more than scare him. He shrugged and didn't answer.

"This is a siege situation. What place here could possibly be considered safe? And how could you possibly get anywhere else?"

Alec looked both amused and condescending. "We're highly trained special ops soldiers. This was a retreat. Did you seriously think we'd back ourselves into a corner with no escape plan?"

"Then why are the rest of you still here?"

"Because it's still safer in here than anywhere out there. For us at least."

"If that's the case, then why isn't DiNozzo here?"

"You mean Logan?"

Gibbs suppressed the flinch and bit back at the anger. "Yes, Logan Cale. Why isn't he here?"

"Because there's a plague about to sweep the nation and he and Original Cindy and Sketchy aren't immune like the rest of us are." Alec's tone of condescension was more than a little annoying but in this case, Gibbs thought he was probably in the right. Gibbs could only vaguely recalled the two other people Alec mentioned. He hadn't realized that they weren't transgenics. Alec continued, "And even if the plague manages to pass us by, there's also the antidote that the CDC is about to release that will kill Logan just as dead. That guy has way too many enemies."

Gibbs could certainly agree with that. "So where is he?"

"He's in a sterile environment by now. Or at least he is if it all went to plan. I suppose we'll know when Max comes back."

He seemed supremely unconcerned. Gibbs forced himself to nod and walk away. He had more experience than he wanted in sitting and waiting for news. He didn't like it, but he knew how to do it. When Max finally appeared once more—suddenly there amongst the other transgenics as if she had never been gone—he was at her side in a moment.

"Is Cale okay?"

She didn't tease like Alec did. "Yeah, he's settled in at Sebastian's."

"Sebastian's?"

"He was a friend. His place is sealable. Nothing in or out, all the air filtered." Gibbs heard the past-tense and knew that whoever this Sebastian was, he had been real sick before he'd finally died. It was too bad about Sebastian, whoever he had been, but Gibbs still found himself grateful that Cale had had such a friend. "He said to tell you that it was boy-in-the-bubble time again. Which is a fairly weird statement even for him."

Max—and Alec, too—looked at Gibbs with the expectation of some explanation. Gibbs really didn't want to think about the last time DiNozzo had been a boy in a bubble. He reminded himself instead that DiNozzo had survived the situation—survived a medieval plague. He could survive this new futuristic plague, too. "He'll survive."

Alec merely looked disappointed to not have the whole story but Max looked pissed. Neither of them pressed for more, though. They were soldiers.

Gibbs tried to ignore the knot his gut had turned into and think through the whole situation.

The plague had been released, and if the antidote hadn't been yet, it would be soon. Fornell was seeing to all of that.

DiNozzo had been found and was currently confined to a safe house, but he hadn't been cured. Yet. Abby and Palmer should be able to work on that.

The transgenics were identified and in the process of being helped, and given proper veteran rights.

The Familiars had been identified and made public knowledge, at least temporarily disarmed.

Gibbs' own situation was of dubious legality but he doubted anything would actually be done to him. It was way to complicated to ever allow formal charges to be made.

The only loose end other than DiNozzo's safety was Aimes White's situation. While that was currently Fornell's problem, maybe there was something that he could do about that.

"What can you tell me about Aimes White?"


	19. Chapter 19

Gibbs didn't see Cale again for a full week. It probably would have been a year except that he absolutely refused to get on a plane back to DC before speaking to the man in person. The rest of the team had long since returned home and even caught another case.

Finally, though, Gibbs had managed to track down the mysterious Sebastian, not at all courtesy of the transgenics. Max had refused to help him, point blank, busy with negotiating rights and regulations for "Freak Nation," as the transgenics had chosen to call their little sanctuary. He knew that she was still in contact with Cale, though, and that he was advising her with the negotiations with the government. For all Gibbs knew, Cale was possibly even at the table via video conferencing.

Gibbs had not been invited to attend those meetings, not that he had wanted to. But it was annoying that he'd had to get Abby's help finding out where DiNozzo had holed up.

He'd had more luck with Palmer of all people. Palmer had been introduced to the late Sebastian in order to coordinate their research on the Pulse bio weapon. Gibbs continued to consider the pros and cons of making his displeasure at Palmer's secrecy known in some suitable punishment so as to discourage repeats versus keeping the threat of such a punishment hanging over Palmer's head to ensure future helpfulness. He hadn't decided yet.

For now, though, he had DiNozzo's current address and was standing in front of his door, telling himself that he had to knock.

Turned out not to be true after all: he didn't have to knock. DiNozzo opened the door without prompting. He was standing on two feet again, but now that Gibbs knew, he could see the evidence of leg braces under the pants.

"What are you doing answering the door? Shouldn't you be in isolation?" Gibbs tone was more angry than he had intended, and he winced at the thought of the reaction it would likely get. DiNozzo merely shrugged, though.

"The original plague has been halted entirely and the antidote had a shelf-life of four days. Neither of them are airborne any longer."

"But everyone in the world is now carrying the inoculation that's deadly to you."

"Yeah. So I'm not so much Boy in the Bubble as I am Rogue. She was definitely one hot lady, although Anna Paquin didn't really do her justice in the 2000 version. She was more young girl next-door look. Now, Halle Berry as Storm, mmm, she was good."

The monologue was so reminiscent of the old days that Gibbs had his hand half-out to smack the back of DiNozzo's head before he recalled himself. Cale, not DiNozzo, Cale stepped back out of range so that Gibbs couldn't touch him, couldn't kill him with a touch.

The silence after that little mistake was long and uncomfortable.

It was DiNozzo who finally broke the silence. "So, what brings you here?"

Gibbs felt himself frowning. He needed to have a reason to see his old agent, to make sure his old partner was still alive after two separate deadly airborne pathogens had been released into the air. Of course, he had a reason:

"Fornell still has Aimes White in custody but he'll need to release him soon. We need a way to control him."

"And what makes you think I'd be able to help you with that?"

"Max." That got an instinctive smile from the man. DiNozzo was obviously infatuated and whatever problems about lies that had been revealed with Gibbs' presence had been resolved. Gibbs had never been sure if it was strength or suicidal tendencies that made DiNozzo attract strong women and then woo them through being annoying. He did the equivalent of pulling their ponytails, but as far as Gibbs knew none of them had tried to kill him yet. That was better than Gibbs' own record, and Gibbs didn't date assassins.

The thought of his lovely assassin girlfriend obviously put DiNozzo in a good mood since he actually answered the original question. "Bribe him."

"With what?"

"Information on his son. He's begged before. I might even be willing to tell him if the pay off is high enough."

Gibbs couldn't quite decide if DiNozzo was more ruthless now that he was Cale or if he'd always that harsh. "Why didn't you use this before?"

"He didn't have anything to give me that I wanted more than I wanted him to suffer in ignorance."

"What about a cure for the virus?"

"I didn't tell him anything about his son when he held a gun to my head. What do you think?"

"No, then."

"Not "no", just not enough."

"And what will count as enough?"

"I'll tell you that the boy is alive. White doesn't know that. The boy was deathly ill when he last saw him, not expected to live."

Gibbs nodded. That sort of knowledge would be a downpayment on good behavior. "What about visitation? How was he as a father?"

"He was actually pretty good. Loved his kid. He was just part of a messed up cult, killed the mother, and convinced the kid that it was for the best. So, maybe visitation but not until there's a protection detail that you personally vouch for."

"Good enough." Gibbs certainly noticed that DiNozzo hadn't told him where the kid currently was. Gibbs himself would have to earn that information. Good enough. And the protection detail would be a hard condition for Gibbs to meet, given the pervasiveness of the Familiar cult. He'd just have to pass on that difficulty to White. White would have to give a lot to Fornell before Gibbs would even be willing to ask Cale for the contact information.

That dealt with that issue, for now at least. Gibbs fidgeted a bit but refrained from pacing. He did turn a bit so that he wasn't looking directly at his old partner before speaking again. "Come back, DiNozzo." Back east, back to NCIS, back to Gibbs' team. He couldn't bring himself to say any of that but DiNozzo would know. "I could probably even get you some back pay for this."

That got a grin. Unfortunately it also got a shaken head. "No. The government doesn't have that kind of money hanging around and even if they did, I'm not worth it."

Gibbs was opening his mouth to dispute that—after these recent events, DiNozzo had definitely proved himself worth it—but DiNozzo spoke again.

"And I found myself a place here. I can't leave them."

"You won the fight. And you told me yourself that you aren't their leader."

"This isn't a fight that's going to be won in a single generation and you know it. And no, I'm not their leader, but I am their friend and they need every friend they can get."

Gibbs sighed. "I can't argue with that." He had to make one more try, though. "You still can't touch Max. That's going to be hard. Would be easier if you moved away."

DiNozzo saw right through the excuse and shot him a rather reproving look. "I can't touch anyone else either, Gibbs. Max is just the one I really want to. Where there's life, there's hope. I'm not going to walk away while there's still hope."

No, DiNozzo wouldn't walk away until it was hopeless. He had stood by Ziva's bedside until her body had grown cold, long after her heart had finally stopped. He could imagine this version of DiNozzo gripping Max's hand even as he died for it.

He didn't want DiNozzo to die for it.

"We can find you a cure."

"Abby's already promised it. No strings attached."

Gibbs winced. He hadn't meant to make it a conditional offer although he wouldn't have been upset if DiNozzo had given in to it.

Gibbs reminded himself that he didn't apologize. They were a sign of weakness. But still, "I didn't mean…"

"I know."

There was another long silence.

"So, that's it."

"Yeah, that's it."


	20. Epilog

Cale looked at his old boss and realized that Gibbs was getting old. The silver hair had made Gibbs look older than he was, when DiNozzo had first met him, but now the rest of him had caught up.

DiNozzo had started over when he'd changed his name to Cale. He'd started an entirely new life and had a rejuvenated body to go with it. Gibbs hadn't had just kept going, same life, same tasks, all in a harsher world than ever. It was amazing that Gibbs hadn't broken. Cale rather thought that his own success in surviving was largely influenced by Gibbs.

"When I left, I broke as many ties as I could, because I couldn't stand to remember or to care."

"I know." Gibbs would understand that. He wouldn't like it, Cale knew, but he would understand it. It was sentiment and devotion and love that survived that he had trouble understanding.

"I've gotten over that now."

"I can see that." Gibbs was clearly wondering where this was going. It was obvious that he thought Cale was talking about Max and the transgenics.

"I'll stay in contact this time. I'll let you know how events are working out."

Something in Gibbs' face cracked for just an instant. A moment of vulnerability hastily hidden again. Cale pretended he hadn't seen it.

Neither spoke for a moment. Before it could get too awkward—at which point Gibbs would either say something too harsh or simply walk away—Cale eased the situation. "You can give me advice and let me know how DC is reacting to the transgenics."

Gibbs leapt at the offer. Metaphorically, at least. "Sure."

Cale had just given him an excuse to stay in contact, something to start a conversation that had nothing to do with sentiment and feelings. Gibbs had to know that Cale had done it intentionally, but that was okay. It was still a viable excuse.

"I'll call you when I get back to DC."

"Have a good trip."

Gibbs nodded.

Neither of them really did good-byes, but the atmosphere was more relaxed now. With another nod, Gibbs turned and walked away. He didn't look back. Cale watched until the car was out of site and then returned to his own work. He'd hear from Gibbs again soon enough.

For now, though, he'd heard rumors of another bit of corruption in the local government that might need someone like Max to look into it. She said she might drop by in the morning and he wanted to have all the information ready.

There's always corruption, but he supposed it was merely a sign that humanity still lived.

He was glad of it.


End file.
